The Fabrica of Life
by iccypenguin
Summary: Ariel," I said, to my servant, to my shadow. "I cannot live if he is dead." And the one who tells me that Laurent is dead, whispers, “It is hard to live." It is hard to live. Follow Faya's life and you will see... It is hard to live.
1. Chapter 1

_I am starting a new and darker piece. Warning: This is nothing that I had ever attempted before. It will sound weird, but hopefully in a flowing kind of way that I seem to think I'm still struggling to perfect. Much critique and opinions are appreciated._

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It was blood. His blood was everywhere. He whipped round as he was falling and the whole world was slow, slow with his falling and his dying and his taking his life with him, away from all of us. As he whipped, his red blood sprayed-a graceful, gruesome image, magical, ethereal, imperial, and I looked into his eyes, and he saw me, and his mouth opened, and the pain of losing him losing him losing him was on my face already. I held out my hands to him in that moment.

I went to him and I held him in my arms on the ground, his killer having slunk away, and I wailed into his blond hair, into his curls that I have loved since he was a child, that I have breathed in bed asleep and touched in fields of grain. And I wept, wept more bitterly than I have wept for my own children thousands of years ago, oblivious to the hands that were touching me, telling me, _Leechtin he is still alive, let us take him into the house where we might save him_. But I knew then that he was gone.

He took everything good about me with him that is all there is, and I whispered "Escha," into his hair, in the red packed dirt, in the air that had tasted his blood.

My Escha. I'm sorry. If I had known then that you would die like this would I have done any of it the same?

***

"Ariel," I said, to my servant, to my shadow who has followed me through all these years. "Ariel, I cannot live if he is dead."

And the one who tells me that Laurent is dead, whispers, "It is hard to live."

It is hard to live.

**+++  
****1st Act - Ancient Sinai, smoky rooms and white faces.**

I laid looking up at the starry sky, and it was such a particular color, this inky blue, someone had spilled dark dark ink on a serrated metal surface, small twinkles of null oblivion shining on me, pinpricking my skin and world. My eyes drifted, lying in the four inches of water, dizzy, fingers floating, black black hair the same color as the water. I could die here, I could. It was too hot, it was suffocatingly hot. The air filled my lungs like thick brine, lips open.

I was vaguely aware that my attacker was standing above me, and that he was going to steal my horse, and that he loved me loved me loved me, and despised me. It is possible more than possible to do both. Everywhere in the world they do it.

"There is a darkness in you," he whispered to me, in a language that was a dialect of my own and it sounded serpentine, "that will destroy you". I couldn't move to stop him but I had to get out of the heat. And any reason, any reason that had made me want to go to Cairo no longer mattered.

If I had known then what it meant, what our intimacy had meant, no matter how difficult, I would have struggled out of the water and clung to him, made him love me more than hate me, would have begged to go with him.

I knew him for no more than ten minutes, his attention unbidden and the result of no seduction beyond being of a particular age and a particular personal carriage. I would have kissed his hands and kissed his face and kissed his mouth and made him stay with me.

I believe he expected me to die in the heat within a couple of days. A fool, a victim of passion, he did not leave me to die but gave me what he believed to be a chance, a chance of which he knew very well I had no idea how to take advantage. But I was old, and full of my own passion, and he did not steal my horse.

It is funny the things that one remembers after the fact. I remember the name of my dead son, Gene, but not the name of my dead husband. I remember my maker's hands, because that is what he was, but not his voice. I know that he was old, or that he suffered, because of where he wandered in hot hot Egypt. A caterpillar again in a world where I had long ago become a butterfly, a youth again, I needed the cold. I would have suffocated on my own breath and baked from the inside out.

I had been walking my horse, sitting high, sitting straight, determined for something. I think I wanted to go to Cairo for revenge because I think someone killed my family and that I knew them, but that is all I remember. Maybe I knew for years after that, but I have forgotten it now. There are too many years piled on top of the knowledge, but the passion itself remains. I remember the passion that I felt, and that it was boiling inside of me, and it was a desire for blood that I had, and it was knocked me from behind. He attacked me from behind. He dragged me down from my horse and pulled on my hair to keep me still while he intimately and lovingly took away my life.

I struggled against him until he had finished biting into me and then I held onto him as if I needed him, and it was my embrace that he loved, and he kissed me. I do not remember drinking his blood. I do not remember dying. I have watched a lot of people die, so I have some idea of what it must have been like, but I think I didn't remember it moments after it happened, and the memory has not come to me.

So I held onto him. I realized that he had killed me, lying in the water, because nothing in my life before that mattered after it. I was a child again, not his child, but of the night in which I was enrobed, and of the water in which I lay, and of the blood which I could taste in the back of my throat. He did not touch me at all before he left, and I believe that I have never seen him again. If he lives still I do not know it, and if he knows that I live, we are apart. I do not care to know him.

We never really knew each other at all.

***

I wandered. I have relived it so many times. It was dry and hot and all that I knew. I grew up in one of the hottest places in the world, and suddenly, without knowing that such things could happen, I was walking dead and running from my homeland. It was unclear in my head what I had become. I had no way of knowing.

Near the beginning there was water, and I bathed many times, fascinated. The heat of the day would become the warm enfolding night and my limbs were fresh. Nearsighted vision had been replaced, graying hair had become long and fluid and black again. My skin was smooth, a soft white color, a pale pink when I clenched my fists, digging my nails into my flexible yet unbreakable skin. My nails were hard, long as they had been at my death, but much more resistant to breaks, and sharp because of their resilience. Sharp is how I felt.

In life I had been somewhat prone to napping in the midday heat, using the excuse of old age for my slowing down. I had been comfortable. Family I had had, an heir, a good position in society, money. I lost it all somehow near the end of the life I left behind, but I could stop caring about that. It was a single-minded flight to the north, to the delta and then across the sea, up through Italy.

For the first thousand years of my life it was flight, and travel, and never being in one place for long. I traveled beyond what I dreamed might exist when I was alive, and my heart was very quiet, very abiding.

But it found me in India.

***

India 5000 years ago was not as one might imagine it. I suppose that imagining it in itself would be difficult. I also suppose that my own idea of what it was is dependent upon where I went myself, but a lot of India for me, actually, is Nery's room, or Yaksha, as he is known now.

He was-is-a maverick character. Smooth, witty, and wild enough to go on living the way he always has been.

I was walking in the bazaar on a Saturday afternoon. There were no bazaars in India, you might say, if you know anything about what is now ancient India, but there was no "Saturday" then either, and I was in a bazaar. I was looking for hot oil, for my hair, and suddenly he was there, his white face staring me down in a sea of dark skinned flesh and blood of living people, two feet away. My hand froze in midair between my side and the bottle I had been looking for.

He spoke to me in the local dialect, which I didn't understand at all, as I had just arrived.

"Tell me about your life," I saw his lips say in my language, the one I still knew the best, the language of my own race of people, who do not exist anymore.

In those days, 1000 years old was not old for an immortal, though it is now. I did not know then that it was the standard to kill the younger ones, but it makes sense to me. It was more dangerous then, for the older ones to be crowded. Cities and technology are able to support much more of us now. Covens did not exist then. It was necessarily an individual existence.

"I will tell you about my life," I said, and his black eyes twinkled at me, reaching out a long white arm for me to take.

It was dangerous. It was a gamble, but I had managed to live that long without being afraid of anything, so I was not afraid.

We walked in the warm evening together, intimately, his fingers entwined in mine. It was not closeness between us, but understanding.

He told me I was beautiful. I smiled with pouty lips.

"Your lips are so red," he said, and again it was not closeness, but understanding, that made him touch me, touching my mouth.

I was not afraid, but I was careful. All vampires are murderers. In those days we killed each other with as little feeling as we killed the living, and I knew he could do it.

If you were familiar with Yaksha, you would know that in those days he had 2000 years on me. I could smell that. He was 3000 years old and he smelled like the humid, overpopulated city in which he lived. Which, is to say, almost human, because it was a such a human place.

Yaksha and I were not lovers, but I wonder what "lovers" is. We were not in love, but we had that understanding, and that intimacy, and I slept in his bed. I never drank Yaksha's blood. He might have taken mine, but I never took his, and it was not offered.

I told him about my life, and he told me about his. Unlike me, Yaksha remembered being human very clearly, and just as clearly remembered every moment of what he called "rapture" and I call "dying". He did not consider himself to be dead, though he acknowledged himself changed. He had not stopped, but continued.

"Maybe you think you are dead because you were running from your life," he said.

Maybe that is the truth.


	2. Chapter 2

_Again, reviews are greatly appreciated._

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Many nights I laid in his arms, drowsing between dreaming and waking in the warm afterglow that is twilight in the warmer parts of the world, listening to the frogs outside his window, the thin walls seemed to breathe. His body was very strong beneath and around me, and his good hands gently untangled my long hair, which he liked very much. I told him about what I remembered about living, about telling fortunes in my youth, and being important to the people around me in my waning years because I had married well. I told him about Gene, and how I had loved Gene, and how he had looked like me and wanted to be like me.

Yaksha says that I told him more, that I told him how my family died and why, and what I was going to do about it, but I don't remember telling him that, and we don't talk about it. We don't talk about that time at all when we see each other, which is as far from often as it is possible to be without being never.

And we were intimate. We were intimate the way two people can only be when they have shared some tragedy that only they know about. We were like family who had forgotten about family, and then realized that the only person who can ever really love you for no other reason than that they love you is your brother, your sister, but there were no brothers and sisters for those as separated and isolated as immortals were in those days. So we belonged to each other without speaking about it, and I was never so close to another person as I was to Yaksha, and I have never been again.

***

"So tell me about your life."

"I was born in Mongolia. My father was a general."

"So tell me about your death."

"I am not dead, Faya. You are so determined."

"We're dead, Nery."

"No. no."

"Tell me about your rapture."

"I was in love with this girl who worked secretary days down by the water."

"It was her?"

"No it wasn't her. She lived near her. We thought she was a witch, one of the bad ones who didn't want to help anybody, but she wasn't a witch at all."

"She? The secretary girl?"

"No, the old woman who lived close to her."

"Oh."

"So I visited the witch because I was incorrigible."

"Much as you are now."

"Much as I am now. And I laid in her arms, and she looked into my eyes, and they were blue, her eyes."

The witch drank the blood of a young man, and as such stories go, her youth was restored and the young man was cursed, but Yaksha, supposes, is far from cursed.

"It's not really a curse, you know, knowing what you're going to eat for every meal. I don't have to worry about it," he smiled, toothily.

I smiled, amused. "How old were you?"

"How old were you?" he asked me.

"55."

"I was 72."

More of a butterfly than I was.

"Incorrigible at 72."

"As things go."

He kissed me because he wanted to eat my beauty, it was that kind of a feeling, and I laid in his arms.

***

His hand motioned to me to come running and I shuffled quickly past the barkers and all the early morning browsing people as he disappeared around the corner. It was dusty and hot, and my feet felt heavy. My head swam in the great milieu.

His arm caught me as I went around the corner and drew me close to him. He was browned in the sun, still lighter than all the rest, but darker than me who has never darkened in the heat. He was more beautiful with color, his features standing out, big, clear eyes always aware. My legs were bare, because it was cooler for me that way, short, black, wrapped linen.

"Don't stray too far away," he said. Friend. His fingers entwined with mine again. We stood side by side against the wall and he was watchful, looking for something. I held onto his hand, tightly aware of his age and his protection because of our understanding.

"There is another one here," he said, softly, "And I am going to kill him. You are going to help me."

Like slamming one's foot down on a cockroach. No thought at all. No sympathy.

"He arrived a week ago and he does not know that we are here."

I nodded, feeling young and vulnerable.

I didn't help him. It wasn't necessary. But I watched him do it, I watched him be a spider. I stayed where I was and he melted back into the crowd, and I saw the other one then. He was older than me, but younger than Nery, and it was Nery who killed him.

Yaksha is not Nery. Yaksha is who Nery is to everyone else. Nery is the spider part, because that is the part that is the closest to the heart of every immortal, the hunter, the part that knows necessities, the vicious part. The human part.

He did it right there, in the middle of the street. I saw him reach out, as he had reached out to me, but I knew what was going to happen before it happened, saw the eyes of the immortal who was as good as dead as soon as Nery learned that he was in the city.

"Don't you know," and the neck snapped where Nery wrenched it and more than a 1000 years of life ended in his hands in an instant. He brought me the decapitated body, and we burned it by the dank water where the frogs lived. He had beheaded the immortal who was older than me with his bare hands, faster than I could have seen it.

It did not change things between us. I had known that he could do that.

We held onto each other before the flames. Spiders. I was arrested by the beauty of the consuming blaze.

***

We hunted and killed together. I think Yaksha was tired of being alone. He would dance, wearing that black linen around his waist, a dance that now reminds me of kabuki, of Balinese dances as well, this vacant expression, these sharp graceful movements. I would sit on the silk cushions in his apartment and watch him moving. Yaksha did not teach me to be vicious, but he taught me that I did not have to enjoy it, that I did not need to lead a life to go on living.

We would go to theater shows together, sit in the dark, comfortable. He watched the stage with arms crossed, and every once in awhile he would lift his chin sharply and drop it, gesturing to me this way, as if to say "Can you believe this?" and I would silently smile. We still go, sometimes, but he is from the old time, and does not so much enjoy being alone as he is used to it.

He was sitting across from me in the apartment and it was quiet, and I was almost asleep, chin on my chest, listening to the ever-loving frogs.

"Give me your leg," he said.

I lifted my chin, wondering if I had heard him right, but his arm was out, waiting for my limb.

I lifted my left leg, from the hip, so he could hold my foot.

"Look at your ankles," he said.

I smiled. He pressed his cheek to my ankle, very cool. I flexed and unflexed my toes. He was quiet, but he looked at me, his always aware eyes reaching out at my sleepy ones, and we frowned at each other.

I turned my head away, knowing that I had to leave.

I know that we were in danger of loving each other, of getting used to one another. We have never talked about it. It wasn't correct, but we spent all the time together that we had meant to, and it was time to move on.

And I wandered again.


	3. Chapter 3

I was still vulnerable at that age, but I was not afraid of dying. I would sit by water and fix my hair, running my fingers through it, untangling it with my hard nails. Unlike Yaksha, I have always been very social. I always enjoy company. I do not feel at my best when I am alone. I would melt into crowds and find my way into gatherings and make my way around money.

I closed my eyes to things that frightened me and opened my arms to those who said they loved me. My heart was not lonely, and there was always ground moving beneath my feet. I don't know how long I stayed with Yaksha, but it wasn't long. Perhaps only a decade, maybe a decade and half. Maybe less than that. It wasn't long at all.

My heart was quiet again and I was glad to be admired, if only for my face, which was brighter and more willing at that time, and so, younger. I would end up in the back of rooms with rich men running their hands up my thighs and pushing their fingers into my soft cheeks. I was not startled by it. They were more surprised to find out what I had had in mind with the lure that was my body then. I did not cover my figure up and my eyes sparkled like Yaksha's did. Joie de vivre, they call it now.

I don't know when I started to feel old. Maybe it was just fatigue. But I sat with my head between my hands, between my knees, feet apart, looking at my ankles, looking at my sandals, studying my toenails, and I didn't want to go to Malta, or Morocco, or Jerusalem, just as clearly as I had known that I hadn't wanted to go to Cairo that night when the stars were oblivion peeking through the dark serrated metal sky. There was a weight on my back, pushing me to the floor, and the weight was age.

I picked myself up. It was Napoli. It was hot, but I was not so young any more, so the heat did not bother me so much. I stretched, rolling my shoulders, and looked back at the party I had left, having felt dizzy for a moment and wanting to sit somewhere quiet. There was fun back there. I dared cheat a glance toward the door in front of me. My feet moved without me.

It was around then that I realized I was being followed.

It wasn't obvious, but I kept getting that kind of feeling.

***

I stood in the dark room that had become my home. Cairo, my oldest destination.

"Show yourself," I ordered the darkness.

Silence. The shadows were full and seemed to move. The darkness was nearly total. No streetlamps. No candles. Half a waning moon. I could hear the wind rustling the trees outside, almost like the sound of rain.

I stood still in the middle of the room. My hair was long and damp, a dull shine in it in the moonlight.

"Show yourself," I ordered again, sternly. A kind of voice that I had only newly discovered I had.

I half expected to be imagining it, and when he stepped forward I was startled.

He seemed to come out of the darkness, as if to be born out of it, born by it, released by it into my vision. He was a vision.

He nodded to me quietly, somehow ashamed.

I did not know what to say to him.

"How long have you been following me?" I asked him.

"I have always been following you," he said. He sounded like the earth. His name was, is, Ariel.

***

I don't think Ariel drinks blood. He might. He certainly is immortal. He may be older than me. We are not friends. He follows me.

He sat across from me, fingering my handkerchief. Maybe he is a golem. He smells like earth.

"I have always been following you", he said to me.

"I have been alive for 1500 years," I said.

He nodded.

"How long have you been alive?"

"I do not know."

"Why do you follow me?"

He did not answer, not then.

I ordered him into my bed and he went there, looking awkward, blond curly hair-the likes of which I had never seen before-slight but sure body, very pale, almost sickly pale, wearing black linen from neck to knees, tightly wrapped around the middle. His eyes were wet eyes, glimmering in the slightest light, and he was very slightly rosy at the joints and in the cheeks.

"Do you feel me?" he asked me from my bed, in the moving dark, the only question he has ever asked me without bait.

"Feel?"

He did not repeat himself. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath.

The room was still. And then I felt him, and it was a feeling that I had always felt, as if there were something beside me, around me, something assuring. I wonder if maybe it is the way some Christians feel about God. If maybe it is the way good friends feel when they are apart, but have said a good goodbye, a warm "I will see you again, and I am thinking of you always" good bye.

"I feel you."

"I have known you since you were a child," he said, quickly, nearly interrupting me.

"You..."

"I saw everything."

Ariel is not an angel, neither whole nor fallen. But I wonder exactly what he is, and I have wondered it since then, since he does not know himself.

***

In the morning I reached for him. He was gone, yet the feeling remained.

I sat with my head in my hands, a posture that was becoming more and more familiar.

***

I don't really care what modern historians say about 4500 years ago. There were not a lot of people, they say. Civilization was in its infancy, they say, modern ways of thinking and living did not exist. History is a study in speculation from existing facts that are born from still existing documents and other "proof". It constantly changes. My memory does not change. It may be selective and specific, but people are always people, and people are a product of where and how they live.

Where and how for me 4500 years ago was Cairo with enough money to get by. Cairo was a big city then, with many busy places to lose oneself in and many quiet places to do the same. There were a lot of rich people, and a lot of poor people, and some in between. There was religion, ritual, and me. There was me, and there were others, a couple older.

I was of a certain age where I could tell when there were others near, but could not identify them. It was not so dangerous, able to know when to run and when to stand my ground. Mostly I kept to the areas of the city I knew and it was alright.

I never killed a lot of my own kind. I considered all of them a kind of family, though I know they are not. I did not want to be near them, but I did not want to kill them. Sometimes it was necessary to kill them, and I did, and there were no regrets or questions in my mind concerning what was right and what was not.

"I don't wonder," I said to my shadow, "if you are protecting me."

"I don't wonder," came his whisper.

"Will you always be there?"

"Always be there," whispered the trees.

***

I went back to India, feeling disassembled, and Yaksha was not there. He was not there.

***

I disassembled, disassembled, cried, bled, screamed, ripped myself up, tore myself apart, and slept.

I slept for a thousand years, and when I woke I cannot say that it was not me who did the awful things that I did, but I can say that I regret all of it, and that I am sorry, so sorry to Escha, so sorry to Escha, who is dead because of what I did more than 1000 years before he was born.

It was the second act of my life. The years when I was lost.


	4. Chapter 4

**2nd Act - Tuscany. Anguish.**

"Faya, Faya," the soft whispering wind, pushing me. My eyes fluttered open. I sat up. I looked around. I looked at Ariel.

He smiled at me, a secret, pleased smile. His hands were together, as if in prayer.

"How long have you been there?"

"One thousand years."

I blinked at him sleepily. That is a silly amount of years, I thought. It is a fairy tale amount of years.

"How do you feel? Do you need anything?" he asked, quietly.

"I feel strung out," I said, swallowing, brow knitted with the effort.

"Do you want to sleep more?"

I shook my head.

He hugged me, which woke me up fast. Ariel is really very much not human. He looks human from a distance but he's not, more so than all immortals I have ever encountered. It is very strange to be hugged by an apparition. His smell overwhelmed my senses. It smelled like being buried alive.

"I missed you."

We went to the open market together and found oil for my hair, which bleached it. I never questioned why Ariel was allowing himself to be visible, why he was not hiding, until it was much too late. I did not know then, important things, very important things about what exactly Ariel can do.

I did horrible things in Tuscany.

No matter how many times I try to tell it, this story is always the same. It does not want to start at the beginning. The details are many but they are meaningless.

The flesh of the story is that I was responsible for the deaths of many children, and that Eno was right to hate me, and he killed Laurent for it, Escha, and I can't take it back.

It's a slow revolution in my mind, what I remember. So much of it seems to come and go, clear one day and cloudy the next. You will have to forgive me, I think, if it does not want to all come in the correct order.

Eno arrived on my doorstep in the middle of the night with his illegitimate son Carol and a note which explained that he had come to be of service to me and could not speak due to a problem he had encountered on his way in his life. The problem had been a scuffle with a group of merchants, but he never told me what the scuffle was about. They had tried to cut out his tongue, but he'd gotten away. His ability to speak mostly recovered by the time we parted, but he always spoke with an almost unnoticeable halting smokiness because of the trouble.

Carol was young, a year old at the time, and I took Eno into my home in part because of Carol. He was the sort of child who has that certain way about them which brightens the world. His hair was dark brown. Eno's was black. He must have been a Russian. What he was doing in Tuscany I cannot fathom, but his language was close to mine at the time, so there was not a problem.

It was his unfortunate timing that was the worst thing. I was not who I am now when I was master of the defense school then. I was half mad with loneliness and confusion about my condition, which was a lot less sultry 2000 years in. It was the existence part that was the hardest, the living without a purpose, all of the lies and zigzagging that were essential to being a part of living society.

I made money by owning a large house that is so much dust and buried timber now, by renting out rooms to boys from rich families who were doing whatever kinds of training to be better citizen soldiers, and with the money I paid their teachers and their boy servants who in turn had lower boy servants. It was as a lower boy servant that Eno began, but he eventually became my personal under servant, and he submitted to my rages and my eccentricities with patience, surefooted and knowledgeable about my desires before I knew about them.

He was present with a cup of tea as soon as I knew I wanted one, as a well folded, pressed towel after a teaching session on a warm day, as a bowed head washing from my feet the dust of the hard packed duel yard and exercise plaza. I wore long robes then, the same as now, and he swept the outdoor hallways diligently to make sure that the fabric that dragged behind me did not pick up enough detritus to be unsalvageable in his laundry basins. He always kept a clear head and worked full days.

At the end of the day he would go to Carol, all smiles and relief. Eno's room was beside mine, so that he could hear me if I called him, but more often it was me who was listening to him through the thin wall, playing games with Carol and teaching him new words. I am sorry to say that I was jealous of his happiness, of his joy, and that it began when I took Carol away.

***

He never deserved it, and I don't think that any of my torment was meant to break him in any way, but I can't think what it was for. It did not make me feel better to do it.

Carol was four years old when he began sleeping in my room. I was familiar to him, so he was not frightened. Eno was a little frightened of me, because of knowing that I was not quite human. It was impossible for him not to notice, close as he was to me.

He had been standing on the open terrace, holding his son. I stood beside him, and we listened to the familiar calling and scuffling and far away shouting of the boys in the exercise yard behind the low trees, up the long path. I held my arms out for the child.

It confused him, because I had never showed any interest in Carol. His hesitation increased my insistence. Carol did not wake up when Eno handed him to me. The child was not heavy.

Eno pounded on my door all night, sobbing and calling my name while Carol screamed. It did not give me satisfaction to emasculate Carol. I merely did it. I imagine that the expression on my face was dour and without line. I held the sobbing child until he slept, but Eno persisted with pounding at my door until Ariel pulled him off of it, which was the first time Eno ever saw Ariel. After that, silence.


	5. Chapter 5

It should be mentioned how much of a blood fiend I was in Tuscany. I enjoyed carrying boys off in the night, stalking them. While torturing Eno gave me no pleasure, killing boys did, and I did it with relish and often. It made it better for me if the boy was rich, and missed after he disappeared. It had never been like that for me. With Yaksha, I had drunk blood sparingly, as he had, following his lead. On my own, before I slept, I had come to be too tired to stalk anyone who put up much of a fight. In Tuscany, it was all different.

I would dress them up as if we were lovers, painting their eyes and pleasing them with the best kinds of food, dripping fruit unavailable to the masses and soft, warm breads imported from far away. I kept them heavy with drink, so I could watch them becoming more and more tipsy, enjoying their stumbling and clumsiness, their loudness and boldness in my room as they talked all kinds of nonsense and declared their love or their determination to escape, one or the other. After I had stolen Carol, there were brief lovers who even swore to their dying breath that they would care for him as if he were their own child if I wanted it, anything I wanted, anything anything anything. And I whispered to them about everything I wanted, everything everything everything, while I squeezed the life out of them with my slender, knowing fingers. Every indulgence, it was theirs through me, but it was never too long before they were dead on my floor and it was Ariel's turn with them.

I don't know what Ariel did with the bodies. Perhaps he kept them. Perhaps he salted and stored them and ate them with his wormwood. He began to smell of wormwood in Tuscany, and like most things with Ariel, I don't know why. I don't know where he went during the day, where he would disappear to when I could not feel him for weeks at a time. Most importantly, I don't know what he said to Eno if he ever said anything. I have seen Eno many times since we parted in Tuscany, and I know that Ariel was with him sometimes, and that he remembers that.

***

I killed Carol the way anyone would kill a child and Eno doesn't remember what he said to me, but maybe it's one of the only things I remember clearly from that time.

"You are only living. This is only a dream, a dream."

By then Eno was a shadow of himself. His eyes were hollow. He didn't have any more sorrow to give me, and in his own way he was eaten up, spit out. I pulled at his hair but all he wanted to do was fall to his knees and hold his son so I let him do it, and he knelt in the pool of blood for hours.

Carol I had felt intimacy with. I don't know what other people feel for children. My own son, when I was alive… I don't know what I felt for him anymore. I had held Carol while he quivered in my arms from his anemia that told stories about the blood on my lips and in my head and behind my eyes. Maybe vampires only really know this intimacy. Maybe I am the only one. Maybe I did not feel so alone then when I had no one else to compare myself to. I caused his suffering and I drank it and it sustained me far beyond whatever was happening on the earth: money, and home, and living living living.

I snapped Carol's head around on his neck with my two hands while he drank hot blood from the wrist of a child a little older than himself. I couldn't stand to watch him. I felt that I would explode, and it was nothing at all. He was only a child. It was easier than breaking a stick in half. He fell sideways. I stood over him with bare feet in the pool of blood that was becoming tacky on the wood floor with my hands over my ears and my eyes shut, quivering. I felt Ariel's arms around my waist, sliding round, enclosing me, and I felt suffocated and I stopped breathing. His head was very heavy on my shoulder.

I felt like a child myself, full of Ariel's cold enfolding darkness. I breathed it, and he whispered to me like a snake, and I felt blind. I only ever remember being so blind in my youth with the black cloth of a fortune teller over my eyes. My lips parted and I called for something, anything, save me, anyone. Save me from Ariel who only brings death, and save me from myself who is concubine only to blood and sacrifice to lust with no conscience.

Vagaries of pleasure shook my body at being rid of a large part of my sanity, and when Eno pushed past my legs to embrace his dead son, I hardly felt it at all.

***

Yaksha sat on his heels in the middle of my room, naked to his navel in red robes that had fallen back on his shoulders. His head was tipped back and I could see his blood stained teeth and my head was bursting full. I put my hands on my face.

"Yaksha, no. No, Yaksha, no. No. I don't know... I can't... I don't know what's going on... Don't you see I'm-"

"Only living living."

He held his hand out to me and I took it in my dream. Are you dead? Are you alive? Am I dead when can I live?

He pushed my blond bleached hair out of my face and breathed close to my skin and I felt a kind of freedom. I felt a way to escape all of the horrors, and Yaksha went on sitting in my dream while I burned all the dormitories and locked the doors and I loved the screaming children while they melted and clawed at their windows, and I loved Eno when he stabbed me with my own dagger after coming from my bed blanched and shaking, and I loved him when he drank my blood and left me to die. And I did die.

O9-]b While I laid in the water where Eno had slain me, I dreamt of it. I dreamt of how I took Eno into my bed and how I was kissing his face and holding him down and all of my passion, all of me, everything. I dreamt of his tears and running my lips over his cool, precious skin, my hand, my fingers spread under his chin, choking him with pressure. Passing through my mind were these images of him clawing at me and shaking and moaning and entreating me to let him go, that he would go, that he would forget about everything. There would be no memory of Carol, he said, let me go because it could be that there was no Carol or vampires as headmasters or warm cups of tea made by shaking hands, but I had all of him instead, and it was with Eno's blood surrounding my heart and haze of him in my eyes that I locked all the dormitory doors.

I don't know where Ariel was while I was doing it, reclining somewhere, ecstasy of perfection. Golem. Darkness. Swallower of light. I couldn't feel him at all while I burned the house and dormitories to the ground, while the children screamed and the sky glowed from the flames that burned upward past the trees and cast shadows on my skin that burned from the heat and blackened at the hands, and while I sat by the stream where it was quiet, and licked my skin, I heard Eno come. I knew it was the end, and I looked up at the moon, embraced heaven above my head as the blade slid between my shoulders so that my eyes filled with tears.

He staggered, Eno, leaning on the sword in me, and I choked on his blood that was in my body, as it ran out past my lips and from my nose and around his blade that he had taken from my bedside.

"Cudonna, Cudonna," he sobbed, my name in that time that had no meaning, so full of nothing like I was in those times, and left me, full of his sword and empty of life, a shell, a cocoon with no sight to see with, a vagrant in flesh, to die.

But Eno has never really left me. And I did not really die.

I drifted.


	6. Chapter 6

**3rd Act - Remembering and Following the Lily**

I loved a man in Cairo, before everything, before I've slept for a thousand years, before time almost it seems. His name was Thieni, or Theeny, or Thein, or Themie... names slips, names, meaningless. He was tall and dark and soft in the face and he glowed; he gleamed in sunlight that loved him as much as I.

He was time before Eno and after Yaksha and with Ariel and he was hands in my hair and words in my ear and palms against my face. I remember Thieni, whether I should stoop to confess to those who ask me about lovers from the past or not. I tried to take him with me and he choked on his own blood and he died on my bedroom floor in the warm evening, with the sound of the frogs outside.

I had knelt beside him, and I had touched him, and I had refused to believe it, and something inside of me broke. I did not cry for Thein, and I have not ever, and I will not. I won't, and I will continue almost to not remember that I loved a man in Cairo who was all names and none at all.

But I dreamt of Themie's hands on my face and of his whispers. And I dreamt that he ran his fingers through my hair and changed the colors of the sunset outside of my window. Blood ran down his chin and dripped on my face but I did not care. Thein the ghost, the dream, whispered, "Leechtin" and skimmed between my world and his own, and he was gone between twilight and the rest of the universe, glimmer of Evening Star, and when my eyes began to flicker away from his twilight and blurred space between himself and myself, it was the sun that embraced me and I laid in the grass and laid there and laid there.

I dreamed in the interminable years and when I woke, I sat up, rested my elbows on my knees, and put my face in my hands. My hair was plaited by the golem who watched over me, and I rocked in the wild flowers of Greek lowlands where he had spirited me, without words, with no sound, and refused to move for a long time until Ariel took my elbow and embraced me.

***

I was Greek before I was Roman. I floated under the surface with dirty money and persisted with sorrow until I was ready to get to my feet. Ariel would sit with me in the atrium of my house and pull his fingers through my hair, blowing on the hot oil that kept it from drying out in the sun, causing it to gleam. He bought me little statues; he swept out the leaves. I stared and thought and dreamed and tried to put myself back together.

I would stand out by the little fountain in the courtyard, my fingers clasping the edge, watching the sunlight reflect off the water and drift. It was easier just to drift, until Ariel would take my elbow and show me which way to go. I would sit in the grass in the long field outside my back window and listen to the wind rustling the wheat, listen to the breeze. I would sit for hours, and I would look for something in the long shoots, the calm waves of grain, what exactly I cannot remember. I would lie with my face on the ground, and smell the dirt that bore my body and be crawled upon by insects and allow butterflies to land on my clothes.

Ariel took care of everything. Ariel, macabre figure, bad dream, omen of death and loyal to me forever, abided me in every sense.

He was like ash; a figure made of clay and manipulated to look like flesh. His fingers, his face-ash. I never touched him to try, but I don't think that blood runs through him. I think that behind his eyes there is nothing, and yet he sees everything. He holds out his hands to me and in his hands there is no promise of warmth or shelter of any kind. He is a mechanism of shadow. A voice without true mouth. He abided me, and I abided him in the same irresistible stroke.

And I laid in the grass, and I played with the stems of flowers, and I bore up under the feet of the beetles, and the curious birds, and the spiders. A spider myself, quiet, in the grass, sobbing without any sound or display. I was ripped open, so composed of crystal, so translucent, and waiting to be myself again, someone I lost, someone I knew. Not someone like this, who kills children, who feels nothing, who is alone but surrounded by monsters. Not something like this.

I lived without living, miserable without knowing how I felt it, until Karpae wandered in and gave me something to do.

***

"Feeling younger than myself, as if out of body, as if full of stars, the warmest glow of cool skin on hot day, in the grass, on my back, being taken up by the whole sky, the air, the earth. So full and empty and waking up and being asleep at once, Leechtin. This is my body."

Leechtin. This is my body.

"It is the softest feeling."

This is my body.

"You are dying," I said.

My body, he had whispered.

"I am dying?" he whispered.

Body, whisper.

"You are dead," whisper.

***

Karpae died in my arms, in a tent that was tucked beneath an eave, with his soft red lips open and his green eyes staring up into a heaven that only he could see with glimmering eyes. I whispered to him with my own lips, shaped so much like his, and watched him with my own green eyes, that used to glimmer so much like those, and I said that I loved him, and he did not really see me while he listened, while he fell asleep, while I loved him more than I have ever loved him since that moment, or ever will. I held him; Karpae, who was mine; Karpae, who was a part of me. Karpae who became so much and who has failed me in every way since his death. I held him close to me and I breathed.

It was what is called now 337 BC, and where there were not armies marching across Europe, it was quiet. I had been living quietly, mostly by myself, for a number of years.

I had established a villa, and I had a field of wheat to lie in, and a big blue sky to stare at. I had sat up on the day that Karpae came, watching the soldiers marching past my villa, hands clasped in my lap, wheat chaffs licking my shoulders. The soft gauzy red fabric wrapped around my body was clipped with a gold pendant shaped like a beetle at the right side of my neck, my hair fastened close to the back of my head with gold pin. I watched with inquisitive eyes the lines of boys who paid me no attention. One of them would come of course, later, to ask me about my house, and who I was, and what I did to make money, and all of those things, as always. I didn't occupy myself with the thought, watching all of their small faces.

He gripped me like a vise, captured me, arrested me. He was toward the front, with his small heart shaped lips, with his large, almond shaped green eyes, all 6 feet three inches of him, taller than most of the others and carrying himself with signs of low but good breeding. I wanted to get up, wanted to grasp his hands, wanted to ask him who his mother was, how this happened, how he could look so much like Gene, whose face I had forgotten. How could it be that he looked so much like me? And he did not see me watching him. He would not know for some time that I had begun to follow him from that moment, and would not know that I watched him always for longer.

I don't know what I wanted from following him more than I wanted very much to be near him. It was easy to tell that we were related, however impossible it felt to me that it could be the case. I watched him plait his long black hair, weaving it up to the back of his head in intricate patterns, hair so long and thick that he would weave it in circles, holding the pins in his small mouth. I ached, watching him plait his hair. What ached, I don't know, but I ached with my whole body.


	7. Chapter 7

_For those of you who might be confused by my commonly used symbols…._

_* * * = a small change of time and scene_

_**~ * ~** = a transfer of scene back to the present_

_I hope that cleared things up!_**

* * *

**

~*~

It is three in the morning and he is made of cracked porcelain in my arms. "Escha, Escha," I whisper, stroking his hair. Where is Karpae? I thrash and turn and Nataniellus is there and he puts his hand on my head.

"It's ok, don't worry. Don't cry anymore."

"Where is Karpae?"

"He's upstairs. He's there."

Nataniellus leans over the brushed leather chair back, kissing my cheek with his soft pink lips.

"You should let the doctor have your Escha now. Let Dasius have him. You can't do anything for him."

Nataniellus begins to put up my hair with his hands. He runs his hand up the back of my neck. I close my eyes.

Escha's mouth had fallen open. I want to touch the mole beneath, that one on the left side. How many people have kissed it? I let his body fall out of my arms and it hits the parquet like a doll. I shudder in Nataniellus's arms and try to forget. Forget. Forget. It's not real.

"Please, take me upstairs. I want to be in bed with my son."

Nataniellus takes me there. Nataniellus, who is always near.

Karpae's arms embrace me in his sleep, and he's waking up when I get there. He's taking me in like I love him and we love each other; as if I loved him for more than a few minutes in a cold tent in Macedonia.

"Is he alright? Do you want him to sleep?" he asks Nataniellus in the dark.

Nataniellus leaves and does not touch me before he goes. Karpae snuggles close to me and I wonder where his lover is. He begins to hum in my ear and I clutch him with my fingers like a child, pressing them into his skin so that it hurts.

Tomorrow, when Escha dies, I will be asleep in Karpae's smooth arms while Karpae looks out the window and dreams of something I cannot know about.

***

"I take it with a grain of salt," Karpae said, wiggling his toes, sitting on the stone pool edge, "My skin is getting whiter but my lips are also getting redder like yours."

I walked back into the house so as not to look at him.

**~*~**

The problem with Karpae in the 23 centuries ago that never really went away was his obsession with mirrors. He knew how pretty he was, of course he did. His mother was a spinster in what is now the north of Greece, and his father was a career soldier man who worked in the civil service to avoid persecution for being of the wrong talent and the wrong class. Those sorts of things change so often. Who can remember the details? Karpae followed his father on that path.

He would spend hours sitting on that pool edge, where the light was the best, looking into his mirror and picking at his teeth, preening his hair, pressing his lips-which were not getting redder. He would sit looking like me with his ankles in the water; looking like me and acting like who knows what, some kind of nymphet in somebody else's worldly garden. Certainly not. Certainly not anything like me.

The whole story is that I followed him from my little house all the way marching across lower Europe into what is now Turkey. He began to notice me after awhile, and I noticed him noticing me, and I began sleeping in his tent even though he didn't know who I was, and I took from him what was vulnerable when his whole regiment became so much more vulnerable in that way. News from the top was that the general was dead, and I knew what I had to do if I wanted to keep him. Besides which, he was to me at the time the greatest treasure I had ever known, and I held him in my arms like that. Who could know that to me, so little time later he would become only so much ash and worthless chatter?

It is not a long chapter. He lived with me. He left to find his friends. There were three of them who he was associated with, and until recently there were still three who he associated with. I know hardly anything about them. I have barely met them. They are of no interest to me.

He is related to me through a long line of buried faces through a bastard child I must have had in my youth. I don't remember children, but I knew his face when I saw it was my face, and I knew his blood when I tasted it was my blood, and that is all that is important about that. The cosmic improbability of something like that does not matter.

Sometimes I remember that feeling I had when Karpae whispered to me about how it felt when his body was dying and I know what it was like to feel lost and human and broken again.

We parted; we met again before I went into the woods in Candine, but that was a long time after, and so far away then. I was not yet so tired.

***

It is almost time to begin to think of Escha. Not yet.

***

I sat in the house watching the door after Karpae had left. He had gone quietly, as I would have done. I sat down heavily in the chair by the atrium statue, sitting on my hands, and then folding them in my lap, slowly. I bowed my head. I knew Ariel was around, somewhere, but I had not seen his face for a long while. My heart was playing a beat for me that is familiar to me but has no name; something about desire, but not knowing for what.

I'd always known he would leave, and I hadn't liked him much anyway, but his voice, his lips near my ear, I couldn't forget those, and I think that those kinds of memories heavily influenced what I did next. There was some kind of desire. Some kind of want.


	8. Chapter 8

**4th Act - Delicate Fingernails on the Soft Skin of the Inner Forearm. Orpheus Dazzling**

I went to Herculaneum because it was warmer there, and I lived there for many years. I was old enough to appreciate that feeling, as if being wrapped in warm shrouds, that particular dense kind of heat that enfolds while stroking the skin; I liked that. I would take walks, bored and tired of my house, walking over by the waterfront, kicking stones and being licked by that soft ever-loving wind.

It was easier to feel playful then, letting the feeling fill, circle the heart, get lazy from feeling good. There wasn't a problem in Herculaneum of money, of people who would open their purse for me because they admired something that I had said or the way that I looked. It was easy to gain favor from people who were also drunk on how easy things were. I would stroll in my long red robes that were strange but not to me, because it was easier in Herculaneum, place between worlds, to be strange without being notably odd.

I made my own clothes, as I always have, buying the best things, and it was almost like Tuscany except that I wasn't mad. I was luxurious and bloated with the best stuff, things like silk and tiled floors and the finest rose colored marble that would warm up just the right way. I didn't have to think about anything, just lay back on my most expensive gold embroidery and be satisfied with it all. And I was, and I loved because it was so easy.

I would sit on my heels, sitting up looking at the moon through the trees in my central garden, surrounded on all sides by the noise of my general household. I would sit with my hands in my lap and I would look, and then I would dig my fingers into the dirt and feel consumed by grief whose color I didn't know, and children who I loved would come up to me and hug my back and I would feel that nameless feeling behind my eyes, pushing pushing. And I would say, "Vivi, go back inside," and he wouldn't.

In the beginning, the villa came with twelve house servants of various ages who promised to serve me and twittered at each other about all kinds of gossip about Herculaneum and various big people, and I thought that I could not have them twittering about me so I killed them all. Then the house was of course empty, so I purchased Vasvius off of a slave trader passing through and I could not have been happier with his perfect skill at washing blood off of lovely rose colored marble and he was not afraid of me because he was too young to believe in the idea that someone might kill you for absolutely no reason at all. It was lovely.

Vasvius had perfect little feet in his youth, and he would come up to my doorway and stand there, as if waiting for something, as if listening, and he would not speak very much, and I did not speak to him very much. I memorized the sound of his feet, and I could always tell where he was. He was good at running the house, even at that age, watching after things. There was no one to look after. Sometimes, there were things to get, but the important things I would go for myself, so often he would just sweep halfheartedly or play with the embroidery on the robes that I made him. He never played with other boys, and I would have forbidden it had he wanted to. He didn't want to. He was a very silent and obedient child. He was a beautiful child, with his long dirty blond hair, browner in the wintertime, long pale legs with delicate knees, soft skin. He did not mind being watched or studied by me in his youth.

Vasvius's character grew even more cold and austere in comparison to the second boy brought into the house. Vasvius was 13 when Vivacio was purchased, and of course he was right to think that I was replacing him because Vivacio looked quite like him, and Vivacio would still look quite like him if Vasvius would stop dying his hair that ghastly reddish brown color that just makes him look like some kind of deposed saint pretending to be something he isn't. Vivacio had the same hair, the same delicate little features, though with a narrower carriage somehow, narrower nose, higher cheekbones, lighter eyes, thinner, shorter, more frail than Vasvius, almost waif like, sometimes ghost like.

"I love him more than you," I said to him.

"You love a ghost, so who cares? I don't care if you love all the boys in the whole city more than you love me. If you can love a ghost who is blown by the wind, who follows you like a dog, then why should I care? Your love is worthless," Vasvius would say to me, these kinds of things, and then cry, and then break amphorae at my feet, break them and throw them at my face and cry more softly and shake.

He did not love me. He would not have left if he had loved me, but that was later, and before that he cared for all the boys and he watched me back for all the times I had watched him, much further aware of the things that some people will do when they are confused and lonely and full of disquiet.

***

Maybe I filled the house with beautiful children to spite him. I did not buy Escha because of Vasvius, though he accused me of it while I kissed him and he sobbed.

"Don't take him into your bed, Leechtin. I won't allow it," he would sob, standing in my doorway like a ghost of who he was as a child, long and refined in the upper carriage of his body, but slouchy, as if crushed from above, crushed by his neediness, his rotten insides, "I will kill him and then I will kill you if you do it," and he tried to do it.

I killed Vasvius for trying to kill Escha, for being jealous of all of them. I twisted a blade into his intestines and he loved every second of dying. He cried and he hugged me while that blade was inside him, and he pressed against me. I'm sure that he thought he would be dead momentarily when he whispered that he was glad to be killed by me, and that he had always loved me, and that he had hoped, all that he had hoped to be. I told him to stop going to whorehouses and talking to river men and buying that awful bread full of the terrible little louse eggs that he couldn't see but that I could smell, and he was surprised to not be dead in the morning. I pushed him out of my bed and told him to get me my warm water that I always wanted at that hour. As if I wouldn't want it just because he was blinking hard at sunlight and feeling rather warm.

So Vasvius was already a blood sucking baby killer before I met Nataniellus, which explains why it was Vivacio who was incredibly jealous at that time and not his older, much more murderous and brooding brother. It wasn't a bother in that case because Vivacio, being the ghost that Vasvius accused him of being, only ever threatened to kill people and never had the balls to actually try to do it. Though talk of Nataniellus will be in a minute because Escha will be first as always.

***

Escha was too delicate as a child to be used for very much more than window dressing and I didn't want him for anything else. I had four boys at the time, not including Vasvius and Vivacio. Vasvius was too old then to considered a boy, but not old enough or experienced enough to be called a man of any sort. Vivacio was 12, barely with a personality.

Escha was not shy about me, but it was his way then to almost be. He would give these shy little smiles, but the sneer behind them had not developed. I don't think he ever had it before he died. He had long blond curly hair because the trader knew exactly what to sell about Escha and that was his natural quality of being an extremely beautiful, well mannered object who could not speak the local language. I, of course, wanted to dress him up and take care of him, but he put fingers in my heart that I have never wanted him to remove.

He was Galois, and though not yet aching for some kind of home that he had never known, he defined himself through difference. Where the other boys would later describe themselves as Roman, Escha has always described himself as French, though he never lived there as a child, and did not live there until many years later. He has never been anything but "Laurent" to anyone younger than his brothers, the four boys in Herculaneum who cared for him as someone weaker and more precious than they were, and even they have called him Laurent for many years.

I brought him home and washed him, and trimmed his hair. He was quiet, seven years old, used to being touched. I would hold his feet, looking up into his face, my Escha sitting up there on the fountain edge, and he would stare back, saying nothing. I made him white robes and tied them with a gold colored rope for his soft sash so that he stood out from all of the others. He slept in my bed, his delicate fingers clutching the sheets, so that I could watch him sleep and he never took meals with others, who teased him without malice but were something of resentful against him, because I favored him too much.

Vasvius tried to kill Escha by stabbing him in the throat. It was late in the evening, and we had been speaking of some matters of the house before Vasvius flew at me in a rage, showing me his kitchen knife and breaking more amphorae. His intention was to throw Escha on my bed and pin him to the sheets through the throat with that knife so he could listen to him die around it but it did not work out that way for him to say the least of it. It was a small victory for Vasvius to have me throw away Escha for the nigh,t who was clean and fresh smelling, for himself who was about to die and daring me to do it. He looked strung out and it all collapsed when he was so run through with that knife, that what he thought were confessions and secrets came running out that I had known already and which were never precious.

"I have loved you since I was a child," he would cry.

"Why did you do this to me? I have loved you since I was a child," he would sob.

"Why can't you see that I do these things because you no longer love me? I'm only wanting to be yours again," he would scream.

And I would whisper, "You are cold and bitter. There is no warmth in you at all."

But I could feel his warmth all over my hands, spreading out over my knees, soaking up into the sheets, soaking up into my robes, and he licked the knife when I offered it to him, dying on the bed beneath me. I don't know why I began to shudder, or why I cried while he died, and there was such tenderness in his kisses when I laid over him, and such softness in his hands that held my wrists so that I could not scratch at myself because of how much I hated what I was, and what I was doing, and he whispered "I know I know" into my ears. So I told him that I loved him.

But he was dying so none of it was real.


	9. Chapter 9

_Sorry for the late update everyone! I was just a little busy enjoying summer. =)_

* * *

About then Yaksha came into my life again. He wandered in, just like he tends to wander in and out now. I was out, breaking from home life for awhile, messing around in the marketplace, and he was there, stealing things. "Oh hi," was his greeting.

He looked just the same, though the clothes had changed a little. Slung over fabric, more of it than in India, white with a black edging. His hair was in the same braid, gray color. Yaksha's hair has always changed color, but more often than not in Herculaneum it was gray. Something about his mood. He gave me an orange out of his shirt and I peeled it, and he took my arm.

I didn't feel like saying much, and he didn't say much, and he didn't tell me where he was staying, and I didn't invite him to my house, but he was nearby always, and sometimes, Vasvius would find us little boys to eat. "You and your pretty little boys, Leechtin," Nery would say, "You are not very wholesome."

***

At that time, I had several young boys working for me, if work describes what they did, and they were of differing personalities. Quite a few of them are still alive. Now they are all old, and shrewd, and rather settled, but then they were loud, and had bad manners, and fought with each other all the time. It was lovely to listen to.

Noncy, the littlest one, would come to me and I would fix his scrapes with kisses and he would go off to play again. Noncy is broken, and dark, farthest from willing to talk to me about his life now. It is because of his best friend that he became that way. It took Ilinia two thousand years to die from the complications involved in becoming what we all are now. For all of that time he was catatonic, and for all of that time, Noncy stayed with him. Now Ilinia, is dead and the sweetest little boy of them all I fear will take his own life. I think that it is his brothers that have drawn him to live close to me today, because they do, and not of his own choice.

Of the others who live with me now, there are, there were, Palomia and Escha. Palomia; fighter, scrapper, always in trouble, always banged up. I did not know when I bought him that he was aggressive and hard nosed. He was not advertised that way. He kept his hair long for me because I liked to put it up, and he liked that, but he was disobedient in every other way, from coming home late to punching and pulling on Escha's hair to breaking valuable statuary and uprooting plants. Palomia now is much quieter, commanding in manner. I am rather proud of his way. He is still rarely home. He is still so intrepidly scrappy.

Cassivio was suspicious of me and he has been suspicious all of his life. But he is not broken, at least he was not then.

The most broken of all was Nataniellus, who has loved me.

***

Before love there was suspicion, and biting, and running away.

***

I hadn't had much place for things like love for quite a long time. But it was a very cold night when I had been walking down by the docks, and it was warmer to walk closer to the bordellos, hugging myself, not wanting to be home but no longer wishing to be out.

I sat by a wall and studied my fingers, running a fingertip around the circle of my red signet ring, trying to be very calm. It would have been very easy to have gone home, curled up with Escha without having to contend with Vasvius, fall asleep, to miss the chance entirely that was about to come to me. I was very vulnerable to how beautiful it was, to be sitting there, to be listening to the water, to be surrounded by the soft light and color of the city at night and not be part of it, to be observing it all. His voice came first thinly, diffused in the air from doors down, high, clear. Because it was Herculaneum, because it was easy in Herculaneum, because it was hard to resist for these reasons, I went and I bought Nataniellus for the night because I had heard him at that moment. I was charmed by his suspicion and complete lack of desire to listen to me.

I did what I did because he was impossible to buy from the bordello, and I was impossible to implicate. I went many times to see him.

***

I can only imagine what he thought he saw when I came through his door. He was stripped or he was wearing very little, I don't remember. It didn't matter to me.

It was not so simple as it seems to be now that Nataniellus came to trust me, because he did not for a long time. Perhaps he remembers it better than I can, the time that we spent together in the bordello, but I remember much more clearly the time afterward. He used to question me often, later, if I really killed the man who would not sell him to me and my hesitant answer is yes. I am not very proud of losing my temper.

These things happened very quickly. The important part is that I stole a slave from a bordello, and that he was taken back, and I, in a very possessive mood, killed all upper and lower management responsible for taking back their own stolen goods and rightfully so. I also did, as Nataniellus heard as rumor, decapitate them and do as he has mentioned to me, something involving decapitated heads of management and pikes and self righteous vengeance.

"You would have done it too," was my reply, I believe, somewhat pleadingly, or sheepishly, "If you had seen what they had done to you. If you could remember it."

Nataniellus does not remember what they did to him, but I do.

He was beautiful when they grabbed his arm in the marketplace. I had scrubbed him, and trimmed him, and dressed him in yellow. He was radiant. But when I found him again he was bruised, and they had cut his hair, and he was crushed, so crushed. I did do what he has accused me of. I did do all of it and more than that, I enjoyed every part.

***

I cannot pretend there is much softness in him that there ever was. I try my best to melt him. I pretended that I knew that he loved me, and though he has told me he did not love me, that it was his life to pretend, I think that he cared for me. Some way. I'm not sure why I tend to want to believe it so much.

***

He was melancholy but he pretended not to be, adjusting to his new life with all of the skill of a man made of masks. He had little regard for me besides being near me, singing to me, slept in his own chamber. For awhile it was that way, and it was no longer charming that he was not interested in me, and quiet all the time, and always unhappy.

Escha would come home from his wandering, as he was to do the older he got, flushed in the face from the heat. He would show me some thing or other he had found, tell me about some thing or other he had heard. I would hold him and rest my face on his shoulder if I wanted, and he would hold my head close to his, petting my hair if he wanted, and everyone was jealous, but not Nataniellus.

It was hard to surprise him. He was used to being yelled at, used to being bribed, using to being deprived of desired objects and rewards. If he came into my bed, he would lie there, in the dark, and I would watch him, but he would not say much, and it did not occur to me then that I needed someone to talk to. All of those silent children, how could I talk to them? They all loved walking around in the market and talking about things I knew nothing about and wanted to know nothing more of. I did not kiss him. He was too beautiful to kiss. His silence both irritated me and revealed the longing in me that I hadn't known was there.

I would lie on my side, resting my head on my hand, watching him sleep in the thin moonlight, intensely unhappy by myself, intensely aware of some kind of feeling that I only knew was mostly related to him, and I hadn't known him long. I was mystified and distraught by his lack of regard. But I was as patient as I could be. There was no part of me that had the ability to be aggressive with him. I would cuddle Escha and while he slept on my shoulder, I would dream of Nataniellus.

I couldn't puzzle him out, I couldn't begin to try. All I could do was dream. I dreamt of loving him, of learning about him, about learning about his likes and dislikes, of ways that I could please him. What might make him happy? Those were the things that I wanted to know, but I was too dreamy to be able to figure him out. Escha laid on my shoulder dreaming of oranges and the Christian God he'd heard about in the marketplace where I was going less and less. More and more I wanted to be home, but it was feeling less like home with this person in my house who did not care for me who I had brought there to do so.

The world was changing around me as always but my heart stopped when I looked at his face. There was no time in Nataniellus's hands, in the soft lines, no progression of change in his honey colored eyes. For him to be interested in me was all that I wanted in the world at that time, and Yaksha belittled me by saying that it was just my first crush and that I was being a baby about it.

"I have been in love before," I told him, in the dark, while he caught and ate fireflies on his rock where he loved to sit.

"How long has it been you dumb fool? You've been alone for so many years, you've forgotten what it was like to really want to be equal with somebody. Stop worshipping him, you old pig. He's just a boy."

"You are eating fireflies. Do not tell me how to live," I said.

"Fireflies are delicious. You are just stuck up and picky."

"I'm not alone," I said, quietly.

"I'm not an anachronism," he snapped, swatting a spider.

***

Sometimes I went down to the quay to sit. I would sit on the end of one of the docks, and I would not think about anything but I would be cold and watch the landscape and whatever happened to be on it.

I had a particular dock that I liked, and if it happened to be busy when I went down there I would become very confused about where I was and what I was doing at the quay. It was very enjoyable but at the same time horrible to be confused about my intentions in a busy place, and Nataniellus took to going out with me sometimes, when I left the house, maybe just to go someplace, but maybe to go with me in particular.

He would take my arm, and we would walk down to my dock, and we would sit there, and I don't know what he thought of it. It was a time in my life when I was having a lot of disturbing dreams, but I was as happy as I could want to be sitting next to Nataniellus in Herculaneum. It was not a very violent existence. But Yaksha was my only friend. He is still my only friend.


	10. Chapter 10

It was not like now. You could be completely anonymous then, while still being very public. You could be completely nobody while you were entirely somebody. I was faceless while having very much influence. I had plenty of income without anyone knowing what I did to come by it and no one entreated me to ask. Now, that sort of thing is impossible. You cannot be public while also being invisible. It is still possible to be faceless while generating influence but it has become necessary to be completely shadowed while doing it. It is hard for me to find my place in a world like that, but it was easy then. I did not like to be alone. I did not like to be by myself. I entertained at my house. Vasvius was very good at entertaining, to make sure that the food is warm and the drinks are fresh, but after I killed him he just got even moodier and began to actively resist doing the things that I told him to do so my house got very quiet. No more parties.

Yaksha did not have that problem. He never has. He doesn't like to be around other people. He was very happy to sit on his rock by himself or sit on it while talking to me, only me. He did not care what day it was, what year it was, he had no preference whatsoever for the locale, though he had a particular inexplicable fondness for the Middle East. He did not care if there was a war on, or if there was economic flux of any kind. It did not scare him to get blown up or not have money. I would sit on his rock with him sometimes while he did things like eat bugs and not care about the world that I lived in. He didn't have to care; he didn't live in it. Yaksha, until very recently, has not lived anywhere but on his very own very private planet, which he did by not liking anybody but me who he could giggle at; counting on me to be someplace struggling where he could come and find rocks to sit on.

There is a reason he cannot do it anymore, but that happened many centuries after I met Nataniellus and it is a struggle in the present which has little to do with the past. Perhaps I am afraid of the present because I am still living there, in Herculaneum, on the dock. That dreaminess, that confused feeling has always been with me since then. I began to become forgetful, to be afraid of doing something and then forget that I had done it, to be afraid of my own power and ability. I did not worry about it very much at that time, but I knew that my time where I could be alone like Yaksha was nearing its end and I had to act. So it was very convenient when the whole world exploded around me.

***

Nataniellus found out very late in the game that I abandoned him after the earthquake, otherwise known as the volcano. To me it was a very mixed blessing of a natural disaster, but I had had a sense of it because I had heard the children talking about ghosts in the house for months. There was no ghost, it was just Ariel scaring the hell out of people because he smelled disaster and was getting careless about being invisible because disaster makes him so excited.

He looks like a ghost anyway, as pale and liquid as you could want, voice dense as the center of the earth, hair wild. He is not clairvoyant, but he is not really something I know very much about so I cannot say how he knew that things beneath the earth were beginning to move in a way that would mean very much death and ugliness and things in general that please him. He began to come into my room and want to be near me and he spent time with Nataniellus in a way that made Nataniellus very somber and uneasy because he thought that maybe Ariel was part of his dream.

Nataniellus had grown very close to the children in the months following his move into my home. They were his duckies, and as I lost interest in them as they turned to him with all of their problems and secrets in a way that they could not ever have done with me. Vivacio by then was as dead as Vasvius, which made him very sardonic and hateful. But I secretly never cared for him. I never felt anything for him and treated his entreaties of boyish love for me with even less patience than I had treated his brother's. I had seen it before and I did not give any time for it.

Nataniellus had known what I was since before he had left his confinement in the brothel but it had sobered him, if he could have been any more sober, to find Vasvius cleaning up the blood and hear Vivacio screaming in the courtyard. I don't think it drove him away from me in any way, but, as I came to know, Nataniellus would become far more spider than me, and much more forbidding. It had something to do with his bitterness, and his dispassion. He really does not have any love or regard at all for humans as I know it now.

Do I feel regret for that time? That time in that house with those children? I think maybe I do, maybe if I can admit it, I do, but what, after all, can we do that does not fill us with remorse in dark times? Once we change, things seem so different. I know that what I did, I did mostly with good, whole mind, and that I was not angry or spiteful then. There was nothing to rage against, no one to destroy. I was only what I was through what had made me, the years of loneliness, the rooms that I inhabited, the soft fabrics that I prepared and wrapped those whom I loved in, to show them that I loved them. It was hard to trust them. It was hard to invest in them. I had been strained. So much had been lost. I could only do what I knew how to do, which was to keep on, and I did.

As I sensed the loss of my faculties, my orientation, my memory, and I recognized those symptoms of disassembling that had struck me in Egypt, I spent many long days sitting by the water, back to the beginning, where there was water, and wonder, and things that were new. I must be very clear about these things as long as I can be clear. I was very aware of Nataniellus's character as I came to know him. I was very aware that he could get on by himself if I left him. I was not sure if everything would be alright with me for very much longer, and I very much did crawl away to die or sleep or fall apart. It was irresponsible for me to take Escha with me to do that, but he was precious to me, much more precious than the others, for reasons that even now are hard to explain. Perhaps it was something of why my own maker loved me, for a few moments, while I floated in the water beneath the stars, because Escha embraced me, because Escha loved me without knowing me. He was never suspicious. He was always so beautiful to me in that way, and even as he struggled as an adult, even as he grew apart from me, I longed for it. These are not things that anyone knows.

While I sat on the dock with my toes in the water, as I watched the water, I knew of the shift in myself that Nataniellus calls "softness" but which to me meant danger and vulnerability. It was like parts of me had begun to shut off. I am being very honest. I may not be clear about some things, and may protect myself in other stories, but I must be honest about this in case that someday I forget it and can no longer tell the whole truth. The whole truth is that yes, I planned to abandon all of them and go away with Escha, and that no, I did not plan to take Escha with me this long. I did not mean for him to live very much longer than he was meant, and that when I ask him if he regrets it, or thinks that I should, it is because I did not want him to suffer so long. He has. Sometimes it sits on my heart and I feel that I will die because of knowing it.

Do not misunderstand that I say that living is itself a struggle, or a torture, or hard to do so much as I say that it can be so heavy to hold onto, and Escha has suffered with it so much for so many years. I cannot say so much about his life because he has not wanted me in it for a long time though he has stayed with me all the same. I think that it is the truth that he felt weak for wanting to be close to me even though he wanted to be alone. Escha was never very capable of being alone. He was weak in that way. I cannot say that I am the same. I cannot take away how much he suffered by saying that I know how he felt, and that I felt the same things. I will not do that, but I have often felt lonely for him when he was away, even if there were so many others who wanted to love me. He is different.


	11. Chapter 11

Ariel knew about the volcano. He whispered to me about it for weeks before it happened. I cuddled Escha and kept him near me, knowing very well not to ignore such predictions. I kept my eyes on the house, giving not so much as an eyelash to Vivacio and Vasvius when they left in the night together. I have often wondered if they knew of the prediction as well; if it has been whispered to them while they slept, or if it were just coincidence that they abandoned the house at such the opportune moment. I have wondered how much they knew all of their lives in Herculaneum, about things that were supernatural, and how it must have shaped them. They are both so different than the others.

I was frustrated with my life at that moment. I wanted so much more than I could achieve. I didn't know what. Something inside of me wanted to get out but I didn't know what it was or what it might look like. I was ambivalent about Nataniellus. I was a little lost. It came easily to me to be depressed, and I was, and I wasn't very mean about it, but I wasn't very nice about it either. I got to wanting to be by myself but feeling constantly lonely, to not want to go out but to feel constantly claustrophobic.

I would curl up in my bed in the heavy coverlet, and Escha would come and climb in with me and be beside me. I dreamt of him all the time. I dreamt of when we couldn't speak to each other, but Escha has always been very quick at learning languages, although he is even more adept at knowing when to be silent, or pretending not to know anything at all.

Our time in Herculaneum was almost at an end and Nataniellus came to know what it was like to die before it was over, though he does not remember any of it. It is better that way. "You never told me this," he said to me, when I talked to him about how he almost slipped away. He was so difficult all the time, why not refuse to be taken like Thein? His body seemed to sag in my arms when I untied him from the yellow silk with which I had unnecessarily hoped to restrain him. He was always running away from me. Of course, I would think that he would fight me again. He was always biting and scratching. He resisted not at all. It was almost like he had been expecting it. He was very drunk anyway. He'd been getting drunk with Palomia off and on who was the oldest after Vivi and Vasvius left. It wasn't very peculiar. It would make him lazy, though he was never anything less than alert at all times for any sign of a threat to his well-being, which it can be argued is most major when depressed immortals fall in love with a body.

So I restrained him. I tied his hands and pushed him to his knees. His eyes were milky with a dream when he looked up at me, and his mouth open, wondering at my being aggressive with him, a drunken kind of surprise. He was not the Nataniellus he is now, though all of the parts were there inside of him floating around, waiting to be reorganized; I have never seen that look again. I covered his eyes. He didn't say very much, simple lips whispering in my ear without breathing, a soft speech whose words I have never known, while I kissed him, while I was a little rough with him, and I cannot tell him the truth of it, that I was passionate, that I threw him on his back so that all of his breath knocked out and he couldn't try to talk to me anymore with his silence. I have not forgotten that noise yet, when his shoulders hit the floor, as if a ghost were shocked out of his mouth and into the air.

I have used the excuse that "it had been a long time" some kind of stupid, trying to explain. He has tried to talk to me about it. I cannot talk about it very much. He has asked me if I am ashamed of it, and I try not to be, but it is that I have come to love him so much and that sometimes I feel the same way as I did then. That something had pushed its way into my body, into my hands, that behind my eyes it was warm, and that the air was rolling on my skin, and that there was some kind of liquid darkness just beside the edge of my vision, as if there were another world waiting to take over my reality, a lost and prejudiced feeling. "That does not make sense," he might say, and I might imagine that it is true that it does not really make sense, so I can imagine that I never felt it at all.

I wish that I had not restrained him, that maybe I would feel less if he had resisted me, if he had pushed fingers into my face and yelled, but I feel that he would not have done so, and that even if I had knocked the breath out of his body that he would not have gasped when I touched his side, the fluttery place that everyone who feels has felt, and that he would not have clawed at me when I bit into his skin, or sobbed at all while I dreamed. His mouth was open, and he made small sounds that may have been equal parts protest, delirium, as I took away his life, his suspicious, paranoid, guarded, unshakable character making no appearance. He was silently choking on his tongue and turning blue. This is what the doctor says who listened to me talk about it, the doctor who says that there was no ghost in him in the sound that I heard. "It was a seizure. Didn't you know that he had seizures? You loved him." I did not know anything.

So that is the truth of what I felt then, and the truth of what it was. And I did cry or I did not. I don't know when I realized that he was dying, slipping away quietly. I held him in my arms. He only knows the barest amount of these things, but I think that he does not need to know them to be happy. He does not need to know about how long I stayed with his body on the marble, or how Escha found me there and laced his fingers into my hair, unafraid, or how he lay in my bed comatose for days, or how I bled Escha for him, because Escha was never frightened of anything. The scars from the razor marked patterns up Escha's arms from then until he came to be taken as well, when they melted away into his young milky skin.

I didn't go to Yaksha at that time because I knew that he would tell me to just let Nataniellus die and I couldn't. Yaksha, who fears nothing but his own death, would have told me not to fall in love. He would have compared me to rocks and to stars and made love to my sensibilities by saying nothing at all to my protests, but even though I did not go to him, he came to my window, and while I ignored him being there, he made love by going unacknowledged. He sat in the moonlight and watched me with a worried look on his face. I did not envy that he was unfettered, only that he had no one to be lonely for, but that is the only time that I have felt that.

***

"I like that you are wonderful." I said, holding his arm, while his mouth was open and he was dead. Escha came with the bronze tureen and held it.

***

"I don't understand what is going on to be honest. You must at least let me see him."

"I must do nothing."

Palomia, scrapper, drinking partner, crossed his arms and looked away from me. His hair was tied with purple ribbons. His eyes blazed at me but he was always so patient without being calculating. I wanted to touch his hair and he slapped my hand.

"Stop it."

I thought. I folded and unfolded my hands. Ariel was sweeping across the courtyard, under the eave. The sound was gentle and homelike. Escha came and went into the room behind me holding his knife.

"Like that. Leechtin. Escha is always coming and going with a knife. He said you gave it to him. Why is he always cut up? This is not normal. It's just getting very weird."

"It's not weird at all," I countered.

"We are obviously seeing the world very differently here because to me, children should not carry around knives and be bleeding all the time."

I went to touch his hair and he slapped my hand again and said stop it.

I didn't let him in then but I did later.

***

He gasped and I held him. Nataniellus did not speak, his knees were shaking beneath the sheets. They were pale blue, the sheets. I closed my eyes against his ear. He choked in air. I thought of his body as it has been, blue, mouth open, all of his moles standing out against the color of his skin, which was pallid, and he was like that, breathing in. His fingers clawed at my back but the clawing was gentle to me, because it did not mean go away. His hair was pumpkin colored and thick. It smelled like him.

"I love you," I said to him, or something like it, and he cried.

By then, most things were decided.

***

Nataniellus sat by the window, and he was very much not like he had been, so I guess he was more like himself. He did not rebel against me; he did not go out in the courtyard in the daytime, or eat with the others. He did not do things to be away from me or outside. He would just sit and think.

He had all the normal things coupled with peculiar things. He preferred candlelight, he did not like to go outside, he did not eat the foods that he had liked. He was unhappy all the time, but he let me hold him. He didn't say it, but we understood each other better, or had come to over time. It was easier for him to want me since we were a little more alike, since we shared something he could not talk about easily.

"Do you want anything? No? Okay."

Escha would come and sit on my bed but Nataniellus did not want him to be there. He wanted to be alone or be alone with me there. Maybe he thought that Escha would remember these things.

Escha himself would sit in the sand outside of the house, shunning the shade of the courtyard that he had favored earlier in his life, picking scabs. He was going into the market a lot, running along the roads, falling and scraping himself on rocks. He had a healthy glow usually, and it was nice. He would take cold baths before coming to me, because it was hard for me to hug him when he was warm and glowing, but he liked to do that when he was hot because my skin is cooler. I would muss his hair while he got acclimated in my embrace, pale yellow with golden highlights from the sun, all those curls. When I got too warm, or if I thought that he smelled too bad he would go off again refreshed and needing a comb.

He did not really mind the knife. I don't really know what he thought of me or what he thought of Nataniellus, if he thought about anything at all, but he didn't make a noise when I sliced him, "never the same arm" he would always say, alternating them, offering them to me, trusting. He would hold out those small arms, wrists together, palms up, and look into my eyes. They were so blue.

***

I don't know how long life went on like that; how long it was before Nataniellus spoke to me again or how many times Escha filled the bronze tureen. I don't know how many times Ariel swept the courtyard or how many meals went uneaten. It really is common knowledge that there was an eruption then, that the ash blanketed places as far away as lower Egypt and darkened the sky farther still. I had known it was imminent, because Ariel disappeared days before, having gone back to waiting in the wings. It is hard for Nataniellus to imagine that I planned things to have gone the way they did because he imagines that I could not have known for sure what might happen. How do you predict when the earth will tremble? But I knew because of Ariel.

It would be wrong to tell the children that I didn't expect all of them to live, and that it was not part of my conscience to wonder what would happen to them. All I wanted of them was my beautiful Escha and his yellow hair. It is all true that I abandoned them. Part of me was still wanderer, I suppose.

It does not bother reflecting upon it.

***

When it was all over, and Herculaneum was left behind, we were in Alexandria and alone. We lived easily; things came easily to me. It was like before. I was not lonely. I dreamt that Nataniellus was there, and that I could smell his skin, but there was no smell. He had not had a smell since the night I had been rough with him. I dreamt of his hair, that particular color, a honeyed kind of orange, a sweet kind of brown. After that were the 2000 skeleton years, and everything that happened in them.


	12. Chapter 12

**5th Act - Skeleton years. Cracking eggs and pulling hair.**

He was chewing on his nails, chewing the cuticles.

"Escha stop it."

He relaxed, unfolding his legs. His hair was highlighted against the sun; he rested his face on his bent knee, other leg dangling, began messing with his toenails.

"So I found a nice place in town where we could go eat, if you want to come," he said, cleaning the dirt from between his toes with concentration.

"I'm busy."

"Doing what?" his fair fell over his face, "Not going into town, probably. Busy doing that."

"Probably," I echoed. I sat next to him on the cold stone rim of the fountain, covered his fingers with my cold fingers, rested my head on his shoulder. He rested his head on mine.

"We've got to get you out of this rut you're in,. You need to go out with me or something. That's the thing to do, you know, go out and get happier. You are very depressed."

I smiled and smelled his hair. I said something about him being 17 and other things, whispered them in a raspy voice in his hair.

I remember all of these things. I remember all of these things while in my own world I am sleeping and he is bleeding somewhere with other people's hands all over him, people who don't know any of these things.

***

Sinking. Inky black. He gives me a lily; he puts it on my face.

_I brought you this._

I am grateful.

***

"If you don't drink blood anymore then you will not be like yourself." Yaksha fades in, fades in, fades out.

"I can make you disappear if I close my eyes."

"Your eyes are closed," he said, "Why do you still want him if you think he's getting old?"

"I don't want anyone," I said. Yaksha pulled the sheet up to my chin and stood back, arms crossed behind him.

I rolled over while he went through my things, dumping things out and scraping things closer that rolled away. "You have so many things," he said, picking through them.

A moment of silence. "I have a prophecy for you, if you want it," he said.

"I don't want your prophecy."

"Bad juju," he said. I could hear him picking his teeth while he tapped things.

"I don't believe you. You should always want to say that to me, because I am different from you."

"We are very different, aren't we?"

***

Escha stopped sleeping in my bed the first time he sort of fell in love. I was bitter about it. He would do what he always did. He was used to wandering around by himself in strange places. That is the danger with older children, I was always thinking to myself in a melancholy way, they don't need you. It was how it seemed to me at the time.

He began staying out later and later. It was almost comical to me that he was doing it. I was feeling pretty old by then, and though offendable, also tolerant. I was busy anyway, lying to myself about being happy. Who cares about being happy? I told myself. Better just to be alive. Better just to eat and live and breathe and be satisfied. Unreasonable. Irrational. What more do you need? Forget about him. What's so great about Nataniellus? Needed to get rid of him so he could grow. Don't be stupid. It will all be better someday. So? What more do you want? I didn't have very much peace from myself. There were no sides of myself that could agree, and some of them were dripping in blood from the pain it caused me. Who can understand something like that? No one is the same in that way.

I would curl up, go hiding places, a lump of red fabric in the corner or at the bottom of the dry pool. Sometimes I would go out to the manmade lake and float. "Someone's going to hit you with an oar." "I don't know how they could miss me." "They won't miss. I'd hit you if I could." "I meant I don't know how they couldn't see me." "Do you think anyone sees us? Don't be foolish." "You are so foolish." They would whisper.

Yaksha was no longer my friend. He and I just were. And we were a lot of things, just not friends. No one could have been further from lovers than we were. Loving a part of yourself is not really loving; there is no love in it at all. Yaksha would go off wherever he lived and maybe sleep or maybe dance or maybe eat and come back sometimes. I didn't wonder then if he worried about me, or if he was looking after me in some way; I was very self absorbed. He wouldn't have seen it that way anyway. Probably not.

It wasn't long anyway before Escha had become very grown up. He has always been very short. It wasn't horribly short, less than average, but he carried himself very well. He had a lot of childish pride, self assurance. His worries were about me sometimes, but we were only so close that way; I didn't know very much about his street life. It was enough anyway. With me, he had very little veneer, very naked to me. So I knew who he was even if he didn't know, and even if we lose these things, they are always there. He was unsure about himself and his identity. It was always about identity then; it is now, too, I suppose. He knew he didn't belong. Even in a port city like that, where was home? He was slow to talk about those things, but I knew. He was unsatisfied with not knowing where he had come from, who his parents were, and he was unsatisfied with the system that had caused him this separation from identity. How to tell him that I could understand some of these things? I am not at home either, I wanted to tell him, it does not matter as much as you think it does. Though I knew that it mattered so much when there were things calling it out. Like feeling alone.

We would lie together in my bed, and I would stroke his hair, and we wouldn't talk very much. Sometimes, he would cry. He never talked about Nataniellus, or missing Palomia, who was his best friend. It was the past. For him, it was a long time ago; for me it was far away. He was 23 when I took him, and he was afraid of mortality, and I was afraid of loneliness, and meaninglessness. He did not go wild at all afterwards, and it was easy to take him, because he yielded to me so much. He cried; he sobbed. Nataniellus has accused me of being in love with Escha. It is the only time I have raised my hand to him in anger. Now that Escha is dying I am afraid of being alone, and feeling like there is no meaning. I am afraid the same way that I was then. I broke all of my promises to myself because I was so afraid. I would rather have taken my own life than taken his, but I have taken his, and now it slips between my shaking fingers like water.

***

After that things were going slowly. I wanted to get out of Alexandria. He seemed to glow to me. Escha was hot and cold. He would rub his arms with his hands, looking down. To me, he was a reed flower; precious, delicate. I wanted to get him out of Alexandria because he knew Alexandria too well. He was too comfortable wandering there, and very vulnerable.

I waded into the water, red robes floating behind me, up to my nose, closed my eyes. Cool waters of Egypt, home. Escha sat on the shore, lolling, basking. Lizard. I dipped my head below the surface and opened my eyes. Went swimming, collecting shells, cooling off. When I came up again he was sitting up, looking for me. I turned my eye on him. He settled back.

I waded back out, heavy and dripping with water, shook off, pressing water out of my clothes, the low slung thin sash. "We are going to leave Alexandria," I said to him.

He was quiet, his head was dipped low on his chest.

I put my hand on his arm.

"I won't go," he said finally, resolute in a meek way.

"It is too warm here for you. You will be happier where it is colder."

He shook his head like a child. His hair was shimmering in the moonlight, little wisps capturing the gleam. I wanted to hold him, touch his face.

"I won't go."

By then he had had lovers, maybe three of them. He felt that he did not need to listen.

***

In the years to follow he would become much colder. When I met him again in France, they were calling him "Laurent" and he spoke only French and a little English. He refused to speak to me in even the vulgar Latin of Alexandria where he had grown up, and called me by my name only to get my attention. Besides his coldness he was the same, maybe a little rotten on the inside, though the sweet kind of rotten for the brave who close their eyes and take the chance to taste. I believe it.

He was much more supple when he was younger; I want that to be understood. He was never sweet, not by nature. I don't believe there was ever anything natural about his sweetness later in life. It must be understood that a lot of what he was in his later years was artifice. But it wasn't all, not all of it. I know that it is thought that he was vain, and that his vanity was a part of his character but he was not vain. He was not insecure about himself either, but he had a lot of hurt.

He had a lot of hurt.

He must also have had a lot of longing.

He must have gotten so tired to have wanted so much more for himself.

And maybe tired to have not known what it was that he wanted.

***

I only heard him pass out from the other room. It was a great crash, as he must have tried to grab onto the long red cloth drapery over his dresser table, sending all of his silver accessories and precious ornaments to the floor with him. I found him surrounded by his baubles, bleeding from razorblade cuts up his arms and behind his knees.

"Escha, what are you doing?" I begged him, holding him, holding him.

It was too hot in Alexandria, that's what it was. He couldn't bear to drink or keep very much blood.

I washed his hair while he floated back up into consciousness, blood swirling lazily in the water.

***

There was a lover near the end, in Alexandria. Not mine, because I couldn't bear those things, but for Escha there was. He always was thinking he was in love, but he was searching for something; it was easy to fall in love in those days. He was curious about other men. They were curious about him too. Perhaps he was easy to abuse for other reasons than he was small.

I did not follow him to protect him, because I was often at home. Towards the end of Alexandria he would come home tired, but I was not attentive enough to demand things of him. What are things that are so small? Some bruises, a few scrapes. Those things are nothing, so I did not ask about them. There was a lover that I killed out of anger, but I get so tired talking about those things. Did I regret allowing Ariel to interfere in Escha's private affairs? Perhaps I do, but what could really have changed? That boy came back from the dead, the lover that I killed. So what? If I had killed him again, would it have made a difference? They never saw each other again. That is all that really matters.

So we left Alexandria for good when he was 23, but he wasn't very good for wandering.


	13. Chapter 13

It did not break my heart when we parted. We grew apart. He told me in advance.

It had only been a few hundred years, but his steeliness had grown enough to where he did not show me any grievance at all for leaving. I came in on him brushing his hair at his table. He laid down the silver brush, looked at me in the dressing mirror. "I'm going. I'm going next week."

"When did you decide?" I asked him, taken apart by it.

"I decided it last week."

"Don't go."

He brushed his hair, turning his eyes down away from me, reading something or other.

"Where are you going to?"

He turned his body away.

I let him go.

***

Where did I go? They always ask me this. Where were you for a thousand years?

It seems like such a long time to them.

It's not a tragedy. I no longer wished to be by myself, but I did not want to love anyone else. Did I feel betrayed? I did not feel betrayed by Escha. I was tired. That is true. I will not skip these years, or gloss over them but I will say that they did not have a lot of meaning to me. I lived in Germany, or what is now Germany. I spent most of my time indoors. Karpae showed up again, and he was the same. Yaksha did not come. I made my own food; I ate inside.

Karpae tried to get me interested in things that I did not have time for. Lovers, travel, blood. I have never been very interested in blood.

"I saw Laurent in Moscow," he would say. Go and find him, he didn't say. He would bring me young boys, children really, give them to me. What can you do in those situations? It is easy to lose an afternoon with a child. I would carry them around my apartment, show them my collection of things, the little soft stone carvings Escha had made me at their age, when he still loved me the most.

These children.

Karpae would take away the bodies.

"Don't take care of me."

"I am not going to let you kill yourself. I need you."

Escha had most of the meaning in my life in his body.

The truth is that I had lived for him, for all of the little pleasures associated with his presence. Maybe he grew up. Maybe he left me. I don't care. I love him. I need him.

Nataniellus, don't cry if I must follow him into the dark. I really don't know that I can do much more.

***

So I went into the woods where Karpae couldn't bother me anymore. I lived in the woods of Germany for awhile, sleeping out of doors, taking long walks, sunlight filtering through the trees. I would leave markers, clothes, things that I had accumulated so that I could remember where I had been, play in the dirt, spend time lying with my arms behind my head and legs curved beneath, look up at the sky through the pines. Not a bad way to be at all. It was not my world; I was outside of it. I had lost something that was easy to lose. The world where I had been and the world I now occupied were unfamiliar to each other.

I must say the only common element between those worlds is me, and it is a flawed comparison, maybe untoward, to place me in both. I require assistance figuring out the minutiae of life, small movements that were natural to me, intimate knowledge of the every day eludes me. Things pass by too easily. Most of all, I missed Escha like a hole in my body. Had there been such a hole before him? Maybe I had not been aware of it, but it galled me that a child could have borne such a thing into my intransient flesh.

I held my own hands in front of me, strolled, making pathways through the leaves in a hushed world that no ears had known for much time, many centuries perhaps. Perhaps no one human has been there. Perhaps they have not breathed so deeply, or been so aware of their own failure, for much of it was meandering through time, taking stock of what I could remember and making markers of what I could not recall. Names of places? Faces of people I don't know, a lot of what I used to know is all smoke and forgotten circumstances to me now. Escha's little ears, the softness of Escha's fingertips, I know those. Things that we remember after the fact. Escha's soft hair, the way that he smelled, Alexandria's earthiness and the thickness of the air in the summertime. Hard to live there, impossible for other immortals, I knew all of these things.

They were all so much of the dust in my mind while I wandered, robes trailing behind me through the leaves, scaring small animals. I felt myself grow weaker with time, and it pleased me in a quiet way to know that I had had the power over that. I had no one after Escha, I wouldn't. His blood mingled with mine for a thousand years, untouched, mixing with no others, carrying him with me always. It is not so strange.

I did not wonder what he was doing, or wonder what any of them were doing, the body of lives that had become acquainted with my own, the permanent "they". They were permeable, touchable, moldable, and I was not. I was unfettered, I was brilliant. Only then, at that time, when I was untouched by the world was I completely myself, and I was what Yaksha was, and I cannot explain that. There were even times when I did not long for company, for some kind of substance, for some kind of comfort from whatever other things that I longed for, that I still long for, unnamed things. Those were the woods of Candine, and I have visited them since.

***

Nataniellus's hand in my hair, Nataniellus whispering, "I care for you," Nataniellus whispering, "I forgive you." Nataniellus whispering, "I dreamt of it." I missed him. There have been faces without number, people who I have known. I dreamt only of him. Perhaps I have loved many times, maybe only a few, but it is only he who has remained. I came out of the woods hoping that he would find me. Only Nataniellus has ever had the power to forgive me for everything that I have done. I dreamt of his hands, the lines on his palm that start in infinity and journey forever, interminable, time without place.

***

When I came back into the waking world, I didn't know what year it was and I was a bit lost. It was not hard to find others of my kind, but they were not happy to see me. There were not many older vampires in Europe at the time, and I had as bad a story as any of them with having spent a millennium secluded and not being able to really say what I had been doing my whole life. What did I do? My English was very bad. As it is with languages, one's aptitude in the local dialect is easy to confuse with one's mental acuity, and so it was with me. It was not surprising, and I was unoffended, getting back into the rhythm of things.

Forget all of the old people of my type who will try to tell you that it is impossible to read adjustment to the world. It is easy to adjust, it is merely hard to master, and screw anyone who expects old people to master the present. Like any game that can be played for a lifetime, learning cities and making one's way about things can be done by a child, and while none are as perfect as children at such things, it is no task for time. A city is a city and all cities basically present the same challenges which are in part that of language, transportation, quarters, and color, where color is what needs to be known- what to avoid, the best places to drink, et cetera. These are information that if not actively cultivated can at least be absorbed over time. English for me has been absorbed over time.

The missing piece in this equation is purpose. Why be there at all? I suppose if one is trying to get at something-job, education, or even in love with someone-that purpose is important, but if one is just going on without necessarily trying to get forward or upward is not so essential, sleeper fish in the equation as it were. I wasn't trying to do anything in Europe, not anymore than I've been trying to do anything pretty much since I went into the woods.

***

I would occasionally smell myself on others and it became known to me what has been commonly known for centuries among our set because it is what has generally made our set. In example, Escha had been bloodying all of Europe and leaving conquests behind. I killed some of them because I didn't care and left others living also because I did not care. It was also with my re-emergence into the wide world that I became reacquainted with the smell of Eno, which was quite dangerous, but I was not particularly arrested by the desire to care about that so much either.

***

I've tried to live in Germany again but ended up living in Italy just like pretty much always. I liked to go walking around in my bare feet, and there were brief moments of purpose like searching for an apartment. Living place to place, that kind of thing is exhausting. I have lived from night to night in different places and it is no way to be. I may have made money to pay for my quarters in a dubious manner, but everything was paid for, completely legitimate. A little more and no name required; a little more than that and no Italian required either which was good, because I have been a little lazy learning languages.

For awhile my coming back into the world after millennium of absence was completely unknown to my acquaintances, which was novel. It was nice not to be bothered, but more than that, to remain unfettered for awhile longer, to feel like I owned a part of the world that was unfamiliar. I did not want to be told what things were, to live surrounded by knowledge of the secondhand. I read, mostly Greek and Latin books collected in my apartment; things that were familiar. I read treatise on love, and I agreed with some of them and not with others, and mostly I kept up like that, alone.


	14. Chapter 14

_Sorry for the extremely late update everyone! I lost my USB and everything was in it. I was between screaming swears I never knew I could and crying my eyes out until I realized it was hidden behind a stack of books the whole time. Don't ask me how it got there, but at least it was there to be found =D_

* * *

And it was then with a shock that he showed up, "I love you, I love you," he said, "I have followed you because I have loved you. I have loved you, I have loved you." And I sat with my head down and my hands beneath my thighs and he sat on his knees in front of me and wept on the stones and I couldn't say anything because it was hard to breath in the closeness.

So the ghost and I lived together. Vivi and I. He cleaned my house just like it had been only a few years ago, laundering the sheets in the cool air of the wintertime, airing them out the window with great motions of his long arms, flicking his thin wrists.

I wanted to ask him about his life. Where did you go after Herculaneum? After you left me. But he would hold my hands between his hands, sitting on the floor in front of me and I would not be able to speak. And it was that, it was all he wanted; to be close to me, to have someone to touch, to talk to, to not be so alone. He was not passionate. He was still a ghost, but it did not matter that he was a ghost so much anymore because he did not have to be very much for me to need him, to crave him, to desire him. And he slept in my bed and he shivered in my arms and I slept with my head on his chest, his hand in my hair.

He whispered things to me, just like air, things that didn't have to mean anything, and I felt something-a kind of safety in his arms, in the drowsy sunlight of an afternoon, some kind of safety that might have eluded me in the past but which I couldn't decide how I had lived before without. I could fall asleep there and he would continue to whisper. I never found out about his life or about his retinue within it. These are mysteries that neither of us have wondered too much about.

"Now," he said in my ear so gently, so gently, "Now you must find these things."

"These things," I wondered.

"Those things," he said, holding me softly, "Those things that you have loved."

"I don't know what I have loved, if anything. What is so good about things that I might have loved?"

"Dumb questions from those who are dying," he said.

"I don't even know if I know what they mean half the time," I said, "And I don't know if they know what I mean."

"Are you afraid that they will misunderstand you?"

"I don't care."

"I think you thought so when I was a child too."

***

I was with Vivacio when I walked into the cathedral where Ariel was. He was inside the box so I went inside it too, and he rolled back the shutter with a loud rolling snap so I could see him through the grate.

I watched him watching me; his grey eyes did not tremble. When he spoke I felt the whole earth rumble, a vibration from the bottom of the planet that felt like words.

"He is in Vienna."

The grate snapped shut again.

***

In the future, cold and meticulous Vivi does not surprise me at all. He kills the same way he lives, which is without passion. He tortures his lovers by not loving them. I find him hard to figure out myself, but to me he has always been a shadow. I don't think I ever kept him because I wanted him. He could always only be pale to Vasvius.

Vasvius remains fiery, though he is more scholastic. He brings me books sometimes, though he will not outright help me, he seems to understand that language and understanding are essential to continuing my existence. Sometimes also I think he just wants to share with someone, and I won't betray him to anyone for that. Many of us I know are only living because we are living.

"You are winding up into nothing, perpetually," Dasius said, the snake who was near to being born when I was alone in the dark thinking of Escha in Vienna, who would soon meet my most precious one in Paris and begin things that were new. When I found Escha again, these things were already far underway.

***

"Dear, dear, Butterhead, these things shouldn't happen to those who are so very sweet."

Nataniellus always called Escha by that name.

***

I cannot say that I was lonely. I was not alone all the time, so I did not go to Paris to follow Escha because I was lonely. I was not there because I missed him.

I had not been to Paris before. Like many times in my life however, the last thousand years of it is scattered across my mind and my consciousness and when talked about the details, they usually come unbidden and in an unfocused way. So much has changed within those years that it is hard to organize for me. When did this happen? Who are these people? It is so much the truth of it that I do not know myself, but I am so much more confused by things these days than I used to be.

I went to Paris in the early 19th century. I stayed there by myself for some time. It was fascinating to me, because I had always been someone to avoid really major modern cities; too much noise, too much light, too many people, too many dangers. Escha has been my opposite in that sense. Moscow, Vienna, Paris; he loved all of these places. Rome, Herculaneum, Alexandra, Cairo; these were my cities. Some things were familiar, though much of it turned out to be altogether too foreign for me to handle by myself. Perhaps I am too withdrawn. Perhaps I am too personal. Perhaps the way that I had learned to do things no longer suited my world, but I reached for him with a hand that needed him, and it was a hand that he did not want, and in the end it was a hand that he only took because he needed something from me. He gave away all his responsibilities to me, and I have them still. What could I do but take them from him when I saw how he had suffered? How could I know that it would not help him at all?

***

"You only want him in contrast to you, who is libertine, and he only wants me in contrast to him, who, for the moment, we cannot tell if he is worse than you or not, because you cloud and mingle your judgment of yourself towards and with that of others. You are a clown," the child spits at me.

***

My first introductions to Escha's companions were made through spying, and they were delicious and horrible. I had not yet heard the story, about the orphans whom he had adopted for himself after the conflict with whom I suppose to have been a former love affair. There was, there is, Nicolas with his brown hair and his small body. Nicolas is almost exquisite, but his eyes betray him constantly, for he is full of locusts and only in the black pits of his eyes can they be seen.

I had been in Paris for a few weeks, keeping to myself mostly, smelling Escha's smell and trying to be peaceful. The day that I first caught view of Nicolas and Dasius, the smell had been too overwhelming for me not to follow it. It was easy to see that the older of the two was different, but while it did not surprise me that the younger one was not as he seemed, I was intrigued. It was not interesting to follow them, because life is so mundane. Watch the child get his hair trimmed, watch the older one watching him. I was more interested in the child at that time.

And then I saw Escha for the first time in so many centuries and I was stricken completely. Everything about him was wrong. He was present completely, but dressed like one of them, his hair was down and done and restrained. It was all so wrong to me. It was all so out of place. Escha; beautiful, delicate, looked tired and old, putting up with the younger one when he pulled on his arm. I wanted to destroy them both and take him with me. He walked into my field of vision, surprising me so completely that I almost cried his name.

I crawled through his window instead and searched his room for things that might remind me of him, trying to preoccupy myself with some notion of the past, but he had left me for another world and given me nothing to remember him by. All of his baubles and mementos were from different times, and I found myself taking his pillow and crawling under his bed, destitute. I wished desperately for some kind of token of my Escha. I slept there in his room with his smell.

***

When I woke he had come into the room, locked out the others. He was sitting on the floor against the closed door, sobbing in a language I cannot speak, and I grabbed his leg.

***

They didn't like me at all. They spat at me and criticized me to him; that I was dangerous to him, that I had some motive, that I was old and therefore untrustworthy. I kept my own peace and he would come to me, like he had as a child, and lie on me and rest, and I would play with his hair with all of the love I have in my body and hold him. He would not speak to me at first.

It was not hard for me to see that he had brought responsibilities into his life like these children in order to feel needed, wanted, to be thought of. I didn't really want to know about the things he had done, or the things he had seen. I didn't really want to talk to him at all. The child's criticisms were constant.

"You are a clown. You are selfish. You are two-faced. You do not love him the way that we love him."

It swayed me to stay that he was so tired, that he would gesture to his Nicky and hold him in a way that seemed so familiar. His real treasure was Dasius, the taller and older one, the darker one. Dasius would hide from me in the shadows, watching me. He was not very vocal. I wanted to kiss him.

It is Dasius, so derided by Escha in his later years, who cares for Escha now while he dies, more desperate than myself to have him live, and this desperation is because Dasius and I are not so different. He has more of Escha in his behaviors and devotions than any of the ones who crowded around him because he has needed Escha the most, and Escha was not blind to this, abusing him by keeping distance and mocking his attempts to get closer. I have watched Dasius as much as he has watched me, and it is probably appropriate that he despises me and I keep it an amusing secret that I love him the best.

He has gained a reputation for ruthlessness, viciousness, and general evil, but I feel that there is no such thing as general evil. It is far too subjective a business. It is easy to dislike someone who is generally evil, and easier to fear them if they are also vicious. I find that it is a reputation fed by an inability to communicate and a lack of desire on the opposing side to listen. In truth, he is far too delicate for all of this ill treatment but I love to watch him struggle because he hates me so. I lose my ability to be objective.

Nicolas, in contrast, I would like very much to strangle to death.

I cannot forgive him the things he has done.

***

In the quietest moments I would dream. It was hard in a place, so metropolitan to go out and find a place to lie in the sunshine, and perhaps my dearest wish has always been only to be on a gentle slope someplace warm with maybe a pomegranate or a mango and the afternoon to myself, watching the lights come on after twilight, the stars twinkling into life one by one and sometimes in great sweeps, glimmering. The business of daytime would settle and become quiet, and I would close my eyes and be content, if not happy.

I spent a lot of time indoors or slinking around the smaller avenues of Paris, away from large crowds of people and an excess of noises and smells. A few times Dasius followed me, but finding that I was not up to anything he soon ceased to do so. I could not convince Escha to come out with me on such sojourns, maybe to show me his favorite places. He became increasingly melancholy, coming home later and later, forgetting his Dasius and his Nicolas, drinking great draughts of blood and fainting in my doorway.

Nicolas called him "Madonna", caring for him like a martyr, but that, to me, is something that is too whimsical. Escha would often go to Nicolas, sleeping in his bed at night and losing his temper in the daytime because of Nicolas's complete lack of regard for rules. Things that to him seemed "merely intuitive" escaped or remained ignored by Nicolas, things like not killing women with families or cleaning up after oneself were, to him, a matter of being honorable of the creature of man. His rules were not Nicolas's rules, and while to him it must have felt disrespectful, he had a certain need for the validation that the violation of his principles delivered in the child's behavior. If Nicolas is wrong, then he must be a more moral, forgivable character. It was easier that way, and Nicolas knew this very well.

Nicolas did not and does not care for any self restraint in any matter including in those involving hurting those he loves. I am sure that he has feelings and reservations just like everyone else, but he is unforthcoming, and very practiced at giving nothing away in his face or body. Escha has entreated me compassion for him, whispering to me at night about how murdering and stalking and drinking blood is all that Nicolas has ever known.

"He was only a child when I had to take him, Leechtin. I love him. Please care for him."

I won't. Now that Escha is dying, I worry that I will have to make sure Nicolas comes to no harm in his absence, but for my heart I cannot judge how I might reach out a hand to a creature for whom I have nearly always felt nothing but severe bitterness and contempt.

***

"I might have died."

"No," I whispered.

Escha turned around to me in the café, smoothing his hair back from his face.

I looked away from him, refusing to speak.


	15. Chapter 15

_I spent all of last night-which, I might add, is also the night I was supposed to be studying for a final (why does summer school need a final anyway?)-coming up with two chapters! I'm beginning to wrap things up but I'm thinking of starting out a sequel to it since I enjoyed the lyrical flow of the piece. I don't know, but it's something to consider._

* * *

Escha's breath is hot on my skin. I am taken up by him and his brilliance, his face etched out in front of the sun, in front of my body. With this heat, with this warmth, must I ache for the Evening Star at all? My heart break, my vision is clear, and just for a moment I know that I have become transient and that I can't breathe at all under all this weight.

I pushed him away from me roughly and he fell to the wood paneled floor with a clatter. Silence. We kept each other out of view, let me look at anything else. I held my hand to my throat and exhaled shortly; my hands shook like glass vibrated by sound.

"You wanted me to," his face was stricken.

I did not deny him. His lips were very red; his cheeks were flushed.

I slumped forward in the chair, holding my head with my hands and sobbed.

***

I found that I had been mistaken. Dasius was not Escha's favorite after all. He had an obsession and when it arrived in Paris, it became much harder to speak with Escha because he was always lost thinking.

Escha knew that Leis was in Paris the moment Leis set foot in the city and his demeanor changed. He became nervous, even more scattered. He constantly tucked his hair behind his ears, breathed in a different way. I wanted very much to comfort him, but it was hard for me to deal with. I remember wondering what kind of person this was, Leis, that not only Escha but Dasius were also obsessed with his presence. What must have happened? I stayed away from it myself.

I was not impressed by the rheumy blond the way they were. He was beautiful of course, delicately featured besides a prominent, straight nose, thin nostrils, long hands. He was six feet tall, and there was something dandyish about him, something fragile. Even for those who are not all there themselves, Leis seemed to be missing some part of his mind, and I could see that he lacked confidence. His beauty was very fashionable, very pale, sick looking, soft spoken.

Escha adored him beyond his ability to speak about it, but Leis had not come alone. This for Escha would be a struggle from that moment. It was never that he wanted Leis as a lover, but that he wanted Leis for himself. I can understand it very well.

It made me sick to see my own relationship with Escha echoed in that manner. It made me want to go away for a very long time.

***

I can remember Dasius sobbing. All of this wanting, wanting, wanting. He told me the story; of how he had loved Leis from afar, how Leis was afraid of him because of the violence in how Dasius took him away. The rheumy blond had been very advanced in his illness and Dasius knew this because he had begun to study medicine in earnest.

"I do not understand why it persists," he told me sadly, softly, "I do not know if he is dying because I cannot get close enough to inspect his health. It is very interesting isn't it? That white death has survived in his body, but Laurent has weakened him anyhow. Do you see how they worship each other? Nicky has observed that they sleep in the same bedroom. To me, it is unspeakable; to cause so much suffering in those that one loves."

I could not figure out what he meant by the last sentiment, or maybe I did not want to understand that Escha could hurt so many merely by the fact of his existence.

Too much wanting, how could anyone be pleased?

***

It was the stupid choice to stay together. It was the stupid choice to gather all of these disparate people into a coven, but none of them were made to wander, and it was Escha's fault for doing that, and I let him rest the responsibility on my shoulders because I couldn't bear to imagine him wanting.

He never stopped wanting. It is Escha's nature to want, to always want, to always be searching for that part of him that whispers to him so much dissatisfaction with living.

"When did you start searching for something you lost?" I asked him desperately, many years later, when it was already too late.

"I don't know that I ever had it," he had said to me, softly.

"You were never so empty when you were alive."

"Don't talk to me about when I was alive, because it fails me so much."

***

It really wouldn't be very long before I moved overseas, following Escha because he wanted, wanted, wanted.

I had spent the journey mostly below deck, indigent for space, disliking the motion of the boat and the high wind above. The rheumy blond spent time near me, coughing and making his own time about things. He was shy about me, and I did not want to talk to him. The man he loved made friends with Dasius and they talked with each other.

Quinn goes by many names. Mostly, they are related to his manner, which is brief, knowing, very focused, completely opposite to his French lover. They call him Abaddon, Darkling, Lord of the Abyss. I do not have much regard for their foolishness. Darkling, why? Because he thinks with his brain?

I spent some time being contemptuous in my bed, refusing to speak to anyone, quite aware of my new and derided position in life. I had not been a head of household since Herculaneum and I had no desire to lord over anyone. Things were moving too fast, too fast. I would spend years observing a city, gathering the greatest pleasures by very slowly melting away all parts of myself into my surroundings, making no nuisance and hardly any footprint, bathing in my life. I had been taken over by younger people who wanted my attention and move me places. I had not been so lonely as to want anyone to take over my life.

I began to know things I had no interest in knowing. The blond one hides his illness from his lover. The doctor is passionately in love with both of the blonds but does not know himself enough to understand it. I began to absorb all of their stories, all of their particularities, all of their useless information, all of it.

It was not that I wanted to be alone, but I did not so much want to be bothered. It was hard to remain bitter about it however, because in America, there have been beautiful things, not least of which sunlight, strawberries, and the one I had been searching for myself for so much time.

***

I lead a life of intrigue, by which I mean I have become something of a cult figure, or a figurehead. I do not know that I have any kind of real power inasmuch as I only possess it because it is ascribed to me by those younger than my person. Is there security within it? Why should I lie to myself? There is great security in the love of many people. Do they love me? What difference does it make?

Perhaps I am being too harsh. I do not want for much and I am always tired. Why not let myself be pampered by so many hands? It is not that I have no freedom.

I arrived in America through New York. Escha was familiar with the city. Nicolas and Dasius melted away into the surroundings, Leis and his Abaddon left to go further south soon afterwards. It was Escha only and myself for some time, and though neither the most pleasant time of my life nor his, we were able to be natural with each other and he took no lovers, no lovers at all.

I would find him picking through my things, and I would leave no hidden tokens for him to find. I fantasized that he was searching for the same version of himself that I had been searching for in his room in Paris, though I know that such attributions are whimsical. He would flirt with my sensibilities, holding my hands, but he did not want to talk to me about his life and I did not require it of him. I did not want him to run away from me. Escha does not talk about the time we spent in New York.

I have seen the pain in his eyes when I beg him not to leave me, when I beg him not to break my heart. He had left me amicably when we had first parted more than a millennium prior. In the intervening years we had grown apart. I never stopped seeking him. I eventually moved West into California where it was warm and quiet.

***

Eno would not begin to attack me until he sensed that I was no longer completely defenseless. He wanted his vengeance, but he did not want it so easily. Had he attacked me before, then it would only have been me he could have had.

***

California was a boarding house of drifters. Often there was Escha, and many times there were others who I had never met but who had been within his care in previous times.

I did not complain about loneliness. I was surrounded by people, but Escha, the only one I wanted, wanted, was closed to me, and the others were simple strangers. I would converse with some of them, but often they were very similar in character and it would grow tiresome. I worried that Yaksha would never visit me. I worried that with having left the European and Asian continents, I had left Yaksha behind as well. Though I had not seen him for longer than I had not seen Escha, there had always been the possibility that Yaksha would come. I worried very much that he would not ever come again.

My bones told me stories about my advanced age. Even as my head let it be known to me that these ideas existed only in my frame of mind, my heart whispered to me how tired it was. I haunted the hallways of the house, both inside of it and outside of everything, head of household, though locus of absolutely nothing.

They came from all over, learning of Escha's location and the comfortable atmosphere. There was some kind of comfort in numbers, and the possibility of not being so alone. It became a community of lovers and dreamers. I worried about the weakness that might be caused by this route but allowed it to happen because I was haunted by the vulnerability I had felt at their age. Most of those who stayed at my house were younger than five centuries and I could not kick them out for fear of sending them to their deaths. I sometimes wonder what Yaksha would have done in my place. But wonder was as far as I'd go.

It was a strange existence. I had never been the sort to live in any kind of real close quarters with my own kind. I could not watch Escha consume the eyes of the men he killed. It made me feel faint, but always when Escha would turn over his heart a little and come to me at night, it would always be then, that every pain and every loneliness felt worthy of my weak body. If he would curl into my bed beside me, I wanted always to remain in that room. If he would touch my hair I wanted always to remain in that moment.

It was a time when I desired anything familiar. Anything. The deepest recesses of my being were full with the agony of aching for things that I had known, and it was then that the one I had been dreaming of began sending emissaries to spy on me.

It is clear to me now what he was doing, that he was reaching out his fingers to test my receptivity, to find out my condition, to feel for the ripeness for his return into my life. I ignored the faces at the time. I ignored that certain or other of my wards occasionally delivering me to déjà vu or seemed to belong less than the others. He came under cover of darkness to see Escha with his own eyes, perhaps confident through the reports of my being oblivious to his children's infiltration; but it was easy to be oblivious to them, because they had grown so much, so much.

He had not changed at all. He tells a story about how he fled from me, that I chased him out of the house and that our reunion took place away from curious eyes, but that is his own fabrication to save my pride. When I saw Nataniellus again all that I could accomplish was to collapse to my knees and sob at his feet. I found myself unable to do more for several days. My consciousness was flooded with relief and all I wanted was to be beside him. It was all I wanted.

But with so much wanting, no one could be pleased.


	16. Chapter 16

**Act 6 - Strawberries and Cream. Blood Against Skin**

Eno lashed out at me.

"I don't want to talk to you."

I held my stomach, hugging myself in the cold, blood escaping past my forearms and dripping off my fingertips. I trembled.

"You know that I am not who I was," I said to him.

"You are everything you were," he hissed.

***

I don't know why I kept it a secret. Honestly I don't think I knew how to tell Nataniellus about Eno.

***

It surprised me that Nataniellus wanted to talk about Herculaneum. We spent years talking about what happened in Herculaneum; or rather he spent a long time asking me questions and I spent a long time answering them.

He didn't care to ask me much about my life afterwards. He wanted to know what happened.

"Did you know there's nothing left?" he said, "I went back there and there's nothing left. I could walk there in my sleep, Leechtin. It is covered in earth."

"Why did you abandon me, Leechtin? Tell me."

Leechtin, tell me. I'd tell him anything as long as he would let me sleep in his arms. Leechtin, tell me.

***

"You need me to protect you. You surround yourself with underlings because if you were alone the vultures would rip you apart," he said to me in the dark.

He spoke of other vampires with bile in his voice, and I could not blame him for the venom. In his younger years, alone, they had been his primary source of terror, coming after him for the old blood in his body. I didn't know he had taken the children. I was glad to have them, but had I known how he would suffer to protect them I would have done things differently. Perhaps he might have hated me for killing them if I had. Perhaps he would have killed himself. Perhaps he might have wanted to kill me for doing it, like Eno. Perhaps none of these things.

He would spend time staring, watching Escha from a doorway, with great softness in his eyes. He whispered in my ear beautiful things, but I knew that to others he whispered that I had ruined Escha, that it was all my fault that he had turned out the way he had. He thought that it was my fault that Escha was always wanting, and when I asked him why it was that he whispered the things he would not say.

"I know all about the rumors you spread," I cried to him, "But it is not true, Orpheus, it is not true." Orpheus. It was an old, old name of his. One that was used whenever moments like these are needed. Whenever moments like these are consumed by my need.

He turned his head away.

"It is not true, Orpheus," I said, covering my face.

***

"You don't understand," he whispered to me another time, "I was torn apart by not being near you. I was addicted to you. Your blood was addictive. I did not love you but I came to love you because you were gone and I was not safe and I was afraid of being picked off. Do you know how many came after me? They came after me and I had those boys, and the boys were full of your blood too and those others, they followed us everywhere. They were young but I was young too and they wanted to kill me, and they followed the children home. I couldn't let them go anywhere. I was trapped. I couldn't search for you. I couldn't go out. I came to love you because I hoped you would come and protect me. I waited 15 years for you to come for us, and I couldn't wait anymore. The boys were restless. They couldn't protect themselves from the vultures who would have them killed to get to me."

"And you became a killer then. An eater."

"Is that bad?" he asked me, bitter.

"I looked for you."

"The hell you did. You were in Alexandria. Escha told me you were in Alexandria. How could I be in Alexandria? It was too hot for me there. I nearly died in Antioch before we could get out. You knew I was too young to survive in such hot weather. You knew that. You went to Alexandria to escape from me."

"Laurent liked to go out. He liked to run away from me. I had to be in Alexandria so no one young would take him. There are young stupid vultures after me all the time too, you know."

"You always liked him too much. You wanted to be with him instead of me. You loved him."

"No," I said, angered by it, "no, it was never like that and I will not let you accuse me of it," hissing, ready to strike him.

He laughed at me.

Nataniellus accuses me of having gone mad but it is that he has gone mad as well. He tells me these stories that break my heart.

But in the dark when we are together, it is as if some part has come back to me and I don't know that I could do with being alone in the darkness ever again. There are things that I will never know for sure, but though he tortures me I know so well that I cannot do without him for long.

***

The others don't know about Nataniellus's rages. To them, he is sweetness, like prickly strawberry, kept, cosmically well groomed and complete in his manners. In the first few years to me, he was hardly ever this way. He would scream at me, and throw things at me, and curse my name and my family and everything that I loved.

It was as if he were two people, and I would hear about and sleep beside one and live beside the other who was always furious at me for one reason or the another. His anger would counter with severe periods of repose, where he was soft and confused and somewhat disoriented, and I would hold him during those times.

There was one other who knew of Nataniellus as he was, and it was Quinn, Abaddon, who knew because he understands so much. I have not spoken to him much myself, because I fear that he can tell me things I do not wish to know. I separated them from becoming friends because of suspicion of motive, but it is my own bias that has caused me to do it. There is so much that I wish that I could know, but I do not want to be told by Abaddon, and maybe for being clairvoyant I might kill him if I could. We are so much blind to our own vulnerabilities that I cared for Nataniellus while Escha wandered in and out with none of the facilities that Nataniellus had developed during the skeleton years. Escha is passionate and soft hearted where Nataniellus is willing to be ripper, tooth and nail.

I should have told them earlier. I was not used to living that way. Nataniellus please believe me. I was blind. I was blind. I never meant for this to happen. Please don't whisper that your Faya has killed his precious Escha by keeping secrets. Maybe I ruined him, please don't tell them that he is dead because of me. I don't know that I could live. I am begging you to let me have peace. Please, there are already parts of me that have gone with him, and I do not wish to go into earth. Spare me my heart, Orpheus.

***

Miriam leaned forward and swept a strand of hair out of my face with a thin, feminine hand. A ring slipped round his fourth finger, disturbed by the movement, too big for him.

"You should get it resized," I said.

"It's ok. It's not important," he said, straightening it delicately.

Miriam is very delicate. He pulled his red hair back, securing it in a loop on the back of his neck.

"I think we're finished here," he whispered, closing his notebook, folding his hands on top of it, looking at me, "Unless there's anything you want to tell me."

Miriam is the most different of Escha's conquests, perhaps because he was not originally one. He was Dasius's, who is different too. Not the same as so many of them; stupid, nonsensical. Dasius, an expert on the body; Miriam, an expert on the mind.

"How do you feel?"

"I'm fine. It's fine. Everything is just fine," he whispered, tightly.

"It's none of my business?" I asked.

He fixed me with a pointed look and picked up a pencil to play with, "It's probably not. I don't know. Is Laurent your business? Maybe we're none of your business. Am I your doctor or not? May I have some professional distance? Probably not either. What's the matter with that anyway, right? I'm 500 years old. You'd think I could catch a break or something like that. I don't need harpies breathing down my neck like some kid who's had his heart broken. I can do this."

"You are just some kid."

"You cut me to the bone when you say shit like that and you lie to me. You lie to me every time we sit down to have a session and maybe I'm getting tired of it. Maybe I'm starting to think I shouldn't bother at all. If you're lonely maybe you should find someone else to talk to."

I pressed my lips together.

"You're better than he is, you know," I whispered, "You are better than Escha is. Don't let him break your heart."

"If I didn't know you were a dirty bitch-ass liar I would think that you sounded a little bitter just then, Leechtin, but I know you're a dirty bitch-ass liar," he said.

"I mean it, Miriam, I mean it," I whispered, pleading with him, but he would not listen to me.

***

The stories of Miriam and Leis could not be more different, but their origins are similar. So many of Escha's children were boyfriends, brief love affairs with no future, born of loneliness and desperation. Miriam and Leis are Escha's children in blood only, for certain, their stories bear more upon Dasius than they do upon Escha. Their futures belong to Escha however, but of course. How could Dasius compete from Escha's shadow? Perhaps this is the cruelty that Dasius has spoken to me about in brief, or part of it. If the children love Escha and he is their light, how could Dasius ever be anything but dark?

They do not know that I have thought about these things. Escha's children hardly know me at all. They see me and they do not know who I am, but Miriam andI have spoken too much. In his study of me, I have in turn learned to study about him.

I don't know how to tell them anything, because I cannot relate to them. If I cannot relate to them, how can they learn from my experience? Perhaps Miriam searches for meaning in what he finds out from my life, and perhaps he does not. I do not know how much "analysis" he tries to do, but for my part I have tried only to piece together the facts because I cannot know everything of the secret intentions.

All that I know of it is that Escha and his Nicky and his Dasius had to flee Paris because of indiscretion. It was a time when he loved Dasius equally. Dasius had not been rash in the city, tending more toward calculation, but he has always been more relaxed in the country, and as a child of 15 he fell quite in love with a sweet, short red headed girl no more than 19.

Miriam is still as sweet, and still as beautiful.

"He attacked me and all of a sudden here was this vision above of me, this blond angel outlined against the sky, my whole world, who wept for me, and I kissed the tears from his cheeks." Dasius did not stand a chance as attacker when compared to Madonna, but he pursues Miriam still, sweet, feminine Miriam who matches him not only in intelligence but also in cleverness.

It is the two of them who have cornered me in different ways. Dasius, who has despised me and been suspicious of me has been foiled by Miriam who has not loved me, but who has let his intrigue overcome his cool regard. It is also that Dasius has been too passionate in this instance, and it is always his passion that betrays him. Leis, a second conquest, could not be more horrified by Dasius's presence in a room, though he and Miriam have walked different roads.

If they could only know how much he loves them perhaps they would feel differently, but they have no way of knowing. Cool, collected, Dasius has been created by betrayals, continuous betrayals by Escha who he cannot help but love desperately.

It is all very mixed up, and Escha, being in the center of it, ignores the implications of such triangular love affairs with intentionally conspicuous lack of regard.

For my part, it is a secret, like most things concerning the younger generations, but it is that I care for Miriam too. My affection is not due to caution, as of Dasius', but it is also not of Miriam's curiosity. What it is, I am not sure.


	17. Chapter 17 Conclusion

_This is where the path of Faya's ends. I hope you've all enjoyed it =) Thank you for all the ethusiasm this piece has conjured from its readers! Look out for it's prequel-The Fabrica of Death; Take Me with You._

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_RR To: Sadie-Since you don't seem to have an account that I can reply to your review from, I'll just leave one here. Thank you for your priase. I'm very glad you enjoyed it. That's the thing about the vampire genre these days though; the Twilight explosion completely spammed the category. It's kind of sad if you think about it, considering Stephenie Myer isn't that great of an author. I admit, I do succumb to the Twilight series once in a while; cause, i mean, who can resist Edward Cullen? (I lean more towards the Jacob side of things. But I, in no means, am taking a side. Who can ever choose???)_

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**The Final Act - Murky, Stormy Promises**

It is that we have come again to the beginning of our narrative, where Escha perished in my arms, and where I slept in the bed of my Macedonian relative, while Escha left the world we inhabit.

Some time has passed.

I cannot say that I have made many connections over the past several years spent on this continent. A lot of information I have not yet sorted out, and do not know how I feel towards. Maybe that is unfair to those who might differ concerning their feelings toward me, but it is how it stands now.

I know a lot of their faces, these young people who make themselves my wards, and I know many of their names, and I know much about their personal lives. It's the sorting out what faces belong to whom and what stories belong to what names that bears thought over time and I have more and more difficulty keeping up.

I am not the only one.

Ariel began coming around to me again in 1943. Sixty years exactly before my loss.

He brought trouble with him as always, as I had come to recognize the concurrence, Eno arrived scenting my trail directly behind him. Anyone else would have thought it a coincidence, perhaps something to do with Nataniellus and the entourage, but I have had enough misfortune in my life to notice the subtleties in a conflict and Ariel is nearly constant.

I cannot really help myself though, when Ariel comes and wraps himself around me like an aged cat and looks into my eyes. He is a familiar presence, deep voice, rumbling but barely heard, purring into my ear, pin pricking his fingernails up my neck, smiling like a deep dark memory.

Eno came sometimes, like Yaksha did, a shadow far away outside my window, maybe standing a little forward of the treeline but far before the wide garden, stalking me but lost in his own world. He came many times, and I do not know why it changed, maybe it did only because all things do.

He decided that it was time for the endgame. For so long, he had a goal in his mind, and I am sure that he had thought about it often in the many years we had spent apart. It would only come out later that he did not return alone. It would only come out later that he had spent time vetting my precious one.

Perhaps I gained a new enemy when I strangled one of the twins, Eno's twins, for slithering into my household and sending information back to his patron, but I couldn't let him leave when he returned after Escha passed away with that smile on his face. Alois was not like his brother who refused to become involved, or even like Eno, who whispered his regret. Alois's mean spirit made him like a shadow, rubbing his victory in my face and I snatched him off his balance with one hand. I cannot imagine that Ambrose does not seek some measure of vengeance. I did not kill his brother, but I keep various parts of him in a jar that ensure that he will not be making very many more lovers for any purpose.

So that is how it has been. I have been very ill behaved since Escha left me again, but I really feel that I cannot be blamed for that. I spend time walking with Miriam a lot. Mariam, who did not blame.

***

Miriam took my hand. We walked together, going out the back door, letting it bang behind us. The warm sunshine felt a little oppressive, like a latex glove across my face.

His black robes billowed, a light silk, a gold rope below his breast, wearing these things for me. His delicate fingers, his very soft smell.

"You must be kinder," he said, talking not really to me.

I did not answer.

"They see how you are with me, and they know then that you are capable of speaking in a manner they are more used to. Of course, they cannot see how vulnerable this whole ordeal has made you, but they feel that they are vulnerable as well. They need leadership."

"I won't," I said, picking at the head of a pink rose as we passed.

"I realize that. It's just the problem of what you're supposed to do in a situation like this. What do they know? You should be kinder to them. Look at what it does to Dasius. Throwing himself at you as if you can do something for him."

Dasius had finally come out of his study the night previous to fall to his knees and cry on the hem of my dressing robe.

"Do you know how hard blood is to get out of silk?" I wrinkled my nose, pretending to make a flip remark, but it was wasted on my Miriam.

"I think that you should make the effort a little more. It is time to. At least with Dasius. You could afford not to insult him. That is what Laurent used to do. Don't pout. You must stop this kind of behavior."

He paused. I bent to pick up a few broken stems, the work of an errant child no doubt.

"I wish that Nicky wouldn't break the flowers."

"You can't blame him for acting out. He's taking this hard. He hasn't been out to the body."

"So no one goes."

"That's not true," Miriam shook his head, "Leis is out there every day, draped over it, crying. I hardly know what to say to him."

Miriam stroked my hands thoughtfully, holding them between his, "Promise me just one thing."

"I won't."

"Please promise," he said, kissing my hands delicately.

"I promise."

"Stop talking about your dead husband. It is driving Nataniellus crazy."

***

I threw a plate at Leis' head. He did not duck fast enough. Heavy breathing. It broke over his head on the way to the wall and he bled through his fingers.

***

I tightened my hand around a fistful of Ariel's blond hair and it did not pique him. He stretched and I sat up, hugging the sheet around my knees, looking out the window. I knew then what I know now, that it was over for me, that it was not my responsibility to care for anyone with Escha gone. Why should I continue it? They were never part of my story at all. I knew that I could go with Nataniellus coming behind me and I could be done with it. Why didn't I go?

Maybe it had become that it was a matter of being tortured and I couldn't think at all. Escha was in my dreams, always, always in my dreams, and it made it very difficult for me to sleep. I did not need Nataniellus to accuse me of setting up the circumstances of Escha's death, and he wouldn't, because Escha haunted me himself. For a long time after I went back to Nataniellus's bed, I would thrash out at him in my sleep and he would wake me and I would find the greatest look of concern upon his face as if he worried for my health.

Is it strange that I longed for a man whose name I couldn't remember and whose face had looked at me that way when I was alive? Man, scion, avatar, soft. He could not be the man, because he was too much like me. Maybe I should have kept it to myself because it broke his heart for me to say his name, dead husband, long ago. What do you want? Do you want me to forget that I ever had a life before all of these things that have happened to me? When my heart was happy and I thought that everything was at peace for me to go myself? Long time away from that kind of thing, that kind of feeling.

It was easier to lie with Ariel who said nothing, who looked at me only to look at me, wondering nothing, caring for me not at all, part of me but no part. I would suck on his thin, feminine fingers and he would laugh, rattling my bones. Secret.

I don't know that Ariel is known anymore in my new life than he has been in my old ones, staying invisible. Maybe when I go, if I can go, Ariel will be the only one to follow.

My path goes in a straight line, its fabric of life never bending, never wavering. I think that maybe, there could be no other way.


End file.
